81–90 of 114 posts
If you're a hacker trying to launch a business, building your own email service to save $50/month is a ridiculous distraction from getting to profitability.
For most reasonable applications that is basically a great advertisement for mailchimp, Eg if you rolled your own solution you’d only save eur 500 a year before accounting for the build and maintenance of your solution.
I have seen far too many articles of these types. As someone who has sent billions of emails I can tell you the following. 1. SES is shit. 2. Value of mailchimp is not in its interface. It is in mail deliverability. Use at least sendgrid.
Can you elaborate on why SES is shit? I've been using it for about 6 months now to run a small newsletter and haven't experienced any issues with deliverability.
Speaking from personal experiences on non-dedicated IP plans on both SendGrid and SES, SES is much better in deliverability of transactional emails, esp. when sent to .edu domains. I felt like SES is more careful in vetting their customers to prevent shared IPs being polluted.
I cannot speak for Mailchimp, but open and click report in a Constant Contact seems to be persistently broken. e.g. email security software driven opens and clicks are registered as human by CC's reporting tools (GUI and API).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can you elaborate on why SES is shit? I've been using it for about 6 months now to run a small newsletter and haven't experienced any issues with deliverability.
SES requires you to know what you’re doing with setup, etc - mailchimp et al hand-hold you through all that.
I would not consider SES "shit" because it does not baby-sit you throughout the setup process. The documentation was solid, and I had a lot of freedom to customize a solution specific to my use case. Overall working SES has been an enjoyable experience.
But maybe my mind will change 1 billion emails later haha we'll see.
Clearly OP's newsletter is a labor of love without much earning potential (or not much effort in that regard), otherwise delegating email delivery to a service like MailChimp is the wisest move. If you're a hacker trying to launch a business, building your own email service to save $50/month is a ridiculous distraction from getting to profitability.
For most reasonable applications that is basically a great advertisement for mailchimp, Eg if you rolled your own solution you’d only save eur 500 a year before accounting for the build and maintenance of your solution.
How many of these €50/month does it take to reconsider? €50 for hosting, €50 for email, €50 for tracing, €50 for sentiment analysis, €50 for this, €50 for that. By the time you realise, you are burning €6k a year on stuff that takes hours to roll out yourself.
I think at minimum "hours" per month seems more realistic, no?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
AWS SES is ~1$/10,000 emails. Are you the biggest spammer or just very very poor? Also, 20 years ago running your email server was way easier than now
At a previous job, all API errors were emailed to internal email lists. The dev monitoring the API health kept track of system health by looking at the number of unread messages in his inbox. If the number of unread messages went up by So... I can definitely see how this is plausible, if not uh, "best practice".
Earlier quoted context omitted.
SES requires you to know what you’re doing with setup, etc - mailchimp et al hand-hold you through all that.
But if you do know what you're doing - like myself and many other engineers - you don't need hand holding. I would not consider SES "shit" because it does not baby-sit you throughout the setup process. The documentation was solid, and I had a lot of freedom to customize a solution specific to my use case. Overall working SES has been an enjoyable experience. But maybe my mind will change 1 billion emails later haha w…