The problem with MailChimp is that it's very simple and easy to use, and once your list actually gets popular the pricing falls off a cliff. At 2,000 subscribers MailChimp is free; at 3,000 it's $50 a month, and it keeps going up.
There's no monthly fee to send email through Mailgun, and the only thing they charge for is number of emails: you can send 10,000 a month for free, and it's $5 per 10,000 after that. You can also manage mailing lists directly through mailgun, but it doesn't have as polished an interface (and you need to send the actual mailings yourself through the API). So if you want a polished interface, use MailTrain to manage your lists and Mailgun to send the emails.
Amazon SES is even cheaper, and also hooks into Mailtrain. "$0 for the first 62,000 emails sent per month, and $0.10 per 1,000 emails sent thereafter."
MailChimp offers better deliverability than Mailgun and SES, but at a pretty steep cost. If you're a professional company with income, pay the $50+ a month for Mailchimp. If you're doing a list for a sidegig or a hobby, use Mailtrain.
The cost isn't just in dollars, but in time and hassle. MailChimp will halt your send and wait for a human to review it and your list practices if you hit various undisclosed triggers. Makes sense, but if your emails are time critical and have real revenue riding on them, it's not really workable.
I'm happy to sign a long term contract and make guarantees about my list acquisition practices, but I lose money and my readers' trust if I click the Send button and it doesn't send.
Plus I can tell my bank at any time that a specific vendor or merchant is no longer allowed to pull from my account.
Even when I travel outside I can use my Maestro card (tied to my bank account) 90% of the times, my credit card is more for backup purposes.
In my country (the Netherlands) you'll have a hard time paying for stuff with a credit card, most shops only accept Maestro cards and NFC payments through your phone. Though most ATMs do support credit cards. More and more shops start to not take cash anymore (expensive to handle).
I personally don't like credit cards since they are about as insecure as you can design a payment system (imo).
EDIT: I meant the insecurity of using credit cards for online payments.
British ones have had them since around 2004. The technical security of the card is the same as a debit card. (There are legal differences.)
> Credit card use in the Netherlands is very low, and most credit cards cannot be used with EFTPOS, or charge very high fees to the customer. Debit cards can often, though not always, be used in the entire EU for EFTPOS. Most debit cards are Mastercard Maestro cards. Visa's V Pay cards are also accepted at most locations.
eg. an American Express debit card (or anything else that is not one of the above) won't work at an Albert Heijn or anywhere else.
Out of interest why are debit cards more secure?
- your name
- the card number
- the expiration date
- the CCV security code
In any system that is not controlled by your bank is very insecure. Since that is exactly the information required to do to new payments. Payment systems like iDeal simply connect (oath style) to your bank where you login securely and approve the payment.
Recently I booked a hotel room using Agoda and I used a credit card to pay, here is what happened:
- Agoda received all the information above from me.
- Agoda used booking.com to "fulfill" the booking, they passed all of my credit card details to booking.com
- Booking.com gave my credit card details to the hotel (actually a small family owned guesthouse).
- When I arrived the guesthouse has written down all the information above on a post it attached to the monitor. Before telling them who I was they showed me the post it and asked me if that was me.
There only about 5 places in the above list where this can go wrong...
Debit is much safer since it requires me to explicitly authorize the vendor and abuse is heavily punished. I can also just tell my bank to stop allowing specific SEPA Debits so I can lock out vendors that misbehave.
If someone uses a debit card or SEPA debit on my bank account (german), I have 6 weeks to report that to my bank and I'm out. The bank then has a week to get the money back of they're responsible, etc.
Here it is definitely their money and they want it back.
I feel much safer using a CC since I know these aren't my funds vs a debit card where it is my money.
I feel safer because I don't need a credit, I pay "cash".
I really like the MailChimp functionality and interface but I could never understand this pricing model and how they can justify charging that much for a few thousand users. Compared to e.g. the monthly infrastructure cost an app or SAAS project your newsletter is about, $50 for 3K users seems really disproportional to how important a newsletter is. Am I missing something here?
With a one-time purchase of mailing list software like InterSpire you can send as many as you want using a VPS. You'll want to monitor the logs and every couple weeks request being removed from Yahoo or AT&T's blacklists, but it costs virtually nothing to run.
LOL.
That's what they want you to think, but no big ESP such as gmail or yahoo have any set of special rules for Mailchimp or other big guys, because that would open them for lawsuits based on an unfair treatment.
My last company was chained to Sendgrid, until someone with yahoo email account clicked on the "spam" button 147 times... on the same email message! That was in 2015. A glitch in Sendgrid system counted each click as unique, and our spam rate got to be 27%. We got kicked out from Sendgrid faster than we could dispute it, and then they stopped answering our phonecalls.
We moved to Mandrill but that wasn't better because they were super-sensitive. We then built our own Digital Ocean $5 box and gradually start sending emails that were NOT spam. First 50 per hour, next day 100, next week 1000, you get my drift.
Today we email about 2,000,000 opt-in emails per day from the same DO $5 512MB box, built on Centos 6 and postfix. Delivery rate similar like we used to see with Sendgrid/Mandrill, at around 86% with click-tru 55% but that doesn't matter these days.
Bottom line: if you don't send spam then why would you be punished for legitimate emails?? Big ESP will take few weeks (a month?) to learn where to deliver your email and we had nothing but good experience. Of course I don't have to mention basic DKIM/Spif/DMARC other basic stuff alignment. Also bounce mailbox needs to be monitored. If you need any further info/help, shoot me a message I be happy to help.
Your thoughts?
Know that Sendy does a phone home which is just to check if you actually purchased the code. There is also a obfuscated file that I've unwound if you were curious:
https://gist.github.com/tittietime/0284ce3b6ef5e4fd35d3aa105...
Do you have other recommendations besides Sendy?
However, Mailtrain is nice as an alternative. Even if you don't want to use it, its existence means that SaaS must compete with it.
If you become large, you could get a dedicated IP address from Amazon SES ($25/mo) or others and own your deliverability.
Mailtrain, WordPress, and others might not be what you're looking for. However, it's great that they exist. They provide competition for SaaS which pushes SaaS to be better and a release valve should the pricing of a SaaS solution get too out of hand.
My only gripe about Mailtrain is its development stack. There was a bug and I wanted to fix it, but it has one of those "magical" type environments where things magically link up and work, which means a ton of investment on my part to figure out what's going on.
Anyway long story short, Mailtrain sounds interesting if it can solve this issue... but it's really not just spam that gets blocked as spam these days, its a major pay to play game and its the email companies that are getting paid, not the people getting the emails.
You could also take a look at Mailgun, which is more expensive than SES but might work better, and Mailtrain has Mailgun integration. In either case, you could look at adding a dedicated IP for your lists, which would help for deliverability, but increase costs: IPs are 24.95 a month on SES, and 59 a month from Mailgun