161–170 of 272 posts
Disclaimer: I might feel this way because they gave me an awesome tshirt one time!
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They are clients if they found us to provide a service they needed, and we can provide it in a profitable way. Our business found Mailgun to be a great solution when we anticipated clients would stick under 10k/mo and not need a card on file. With Stripe, every time they pay their cut, they've had a sale. Every time they mail-out through MailChimp, it's to a list of customers. We are usually using Mailgun to send tra…
I'm completely with you on this. The responses to your posts are disgusting. I don't think a lot of people around here understand what it means to provide services to small local businesses. I don't know about you, but I'm in a smaller community, people here still earn $7.25 per hour, and I just don't have access to deep-pocketed big businesses. I work with small businesses, individual business owner/operators, and m…
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The thing that annoys me is the standard operating procedure in tech is to offer stuff for free until a bunch of people depend on it and then to start charging as much as you possibly can once there's a large enough customer base that a reasonable percentage won't have any choice but to bear the updated costs. Mailgun did a pretty nice job by offering a pay-as-you-go tier, but they still took features from the free p…
It really has become a norm and is very frustrating for customers, while there is simply a better way to do this - kill free plan for NEW customers, but grandfather existing customers. Or at least introduce some break-even (low profit margin) plan/tier to move existing customers to, no need to force them off the platform completely. Yes, spammers are a big issue for all ESPs (my own biz in this space is no exception)…
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Amazon SES — $0.10 per 1000 emails.
Because it's shite. I've blocked SES's IP range on all my servers, as they just ignore spam reports.
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I don't underestimate how bad clients can be. I don't over-estimate how hard it is for some self-employed people to ask for more money. It's ok to be fired by people who aren't paying you. It's even better to fire clients who aren't.
These clients ARE paying me. I like them. They just have an overloaded plate of issues and it’s no fun having to tax them further when a third-party setup changes. Initial point wasn’t even about cost but hassle.
Losing the inbound routes functionality completes wrecks my use-case for mailgun. I've been using it as a way to have business emails come through a custom domain and then routed to personal email addresses. It actually works well enough as with personal email you can respond "as" the custom domain. I have a tiny startup with a few users that I use the routing to move incoming email to also their own personal address…
Ugh. I settled on Mailgun for this use case recently and now I'll have to switch. I used to use https://medium.com/@ashan.fernando/forwarding-emails-to-your... to do this cheaply via SES, but it was a pain to set up for new domains and had some odd behavior at times. https://improvmx.com was something else I came across, but I don't feel great trusting an unknown service with all my incoming mail. Zoho works and is f…
ImprovMX has always worked great. I have used it for a handful of email addresses that all forward to my personal account. If your personal account is gmail it's also very easy to set up a "send as." I will definitely use this first next time I need something like this.
ForwardEmail is indeed open source and works pretty good. It's a little more setup than ImprovMX and I did have an issue where sometimes mail would bounce back to the sender and they would tell me about it. I don't know whose fault it was tho, because it was only one sender and her SMTP server was strict. I did also have an issue where all the mail was going into the spam folder of my personal email, but I'm pretty sure it was my fault. I clicked "spam" for a spam message and then gmail started assuming everything from forwardemail.net must be spam so silently "helped" me by hiding everything D-: Once I figured it out I was able to fix it by marking the emails as "not spam" but it occasionally would spam something I needed. So, if you use either of these services, never mark the message as spam. Also if you use forwardemail throw the dev a few bucks (https://forwardemail.net/en/donate) . Here's the code: https://github.com/forwardemail/free-email-forwarding
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Because it's shite. I've blocked SES's IP range on all my servers, as they just ignore spam reports.
It's not actually SES' responsibility, the sender can use SQS to receive bounceback/spam notifications and act on it.
Welp FML. I run a free/lets encrypt/no ads web adaptation of a board game with email verification for only signups and password resets, no "blasts", no nothing else, and I send out ~150 mailgun emails a day. I mean I guess I can disable it and... if you lose your password, you're fucked? Handling my own SMTP sounds like a nightmare.
I use Mailgun with various client sites. Where I find these sorts of services awkward as they become paid (Google Maps APIs are similar) is that for each client I have to put my credit card on file, monitor charges and bear costs in case of a blow-up OR I have to go through the hassle of coaching technically hapless clients through logging in and adding a credit card. “I thought you said it would be free?” “It probab…
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Perhaps the better answer is to never pitch or put your clients on any "free" plan. Explain that these sorts of marketing and outreach campaigns cost money, just like getting a Yellow Pages ad costs money, and perhaps work with them on figuring out how many customers or leads these efforts generate so they can more accurately evaluate the cost.
I have a lot of clients using MailChimp's free plan which has worked well for them. I am grandfathered into using all Google's services for my business for free (ignore usual criticisms of Google) because I got in early. I've worked in this industry for over 20 years and found that the more complicated your explanation, the less likely clients are to want to work with you. Being a stick in the mud on usability is ano…
As long as you understand the risk you are carrying you can price out the externalities of it going south.
To explain that, consider this artificial example made up based on what you just wrote; "I have a lot of clients using MailChimp's free plan ..."
Now lets say MailChimp has a tough few quarters, maybe they get a new CEO or maybe they just need to get more money for their services than they currently do and so they revise their "free" plans into non-free plans in ways that prevent some chunk of your customers from using their free plans.
Your customers are forced to change their previously working system for a different system. Four outcomes pop out of that event; They can use their current system but now it costs them more money, they can hire you (more money) to come up with another free system which they now know will only last for some random period of time, you can design a new system for them for free (costs you money), or they can go with a new contractor who will design a new system for them.
As the original provider of the system, you cannot predict when this event will occur. It may occur at a slow time, it may occur on black friday when it the customer's busiest time of year. And as the original provider you cannot predict the new cost of the system, or the cost of a replacement system.
So the risk you are carrying here is mostly reputational (some of your customers will say bad things about you if this event happens at a bad time or costs them a lot of money they were not expecting to pay.) Depending on what type of warranty you provide or imply for your services (most people disclaim these so the common case would be to leave the customer with the costs) you may be carrying some financial risk to correct the future situation.
I will reiterate that there is absolutely nothing wrong with carrying this risk, as long as you are aware you are carrying it. Because you can plan for the various cases (for example by continually researching equivalents to MailChimp so that in the event this happens you can quickly and easily move your customers over to the new solution)