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Comment by choot | Hacker News Reader

I've used it and i find it expensive.

Aren't their services which use our AWS SES account (with automatic setup) and offer same features as MailChimp but much cheaper?

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Yes, I use one called Sendy (https://sendy.co/). Subscription-free, one time payment of $59 and emails sent through Amazon SES. As a small business owner, I have no idea why someone would use MailChimp over this.

You can get even cheaper than that by using phplist instead, which is free, and setting that up with your AWS account.

Hard to beat $0.10 per 1,000 emails...

Sendy looks cool (thanks for the link) but you have to install it, host it, maintain it and from the looks of it, purchase it again every new major version. Most small biz owners (from my exp) are not looking for that sort of involvement. If you're a startup/small tech co. it makes sense.

What you'll find is that as features and reporting and business user-friendly UI becomes more important, there's overhead that comes with the company to provide those things, so their CPMs (or other pricing) tends to go up.

SES is for all intents and purposes a "dumb pipe" that will send email, and provide APIs for things. AWS Pinpoint is a step up from that, but I personally found some features lacking at this point aside from basic usage compared against more full-featured ESPs.

There's a whole range of products catering to different market segments though. Mailchimp is what I'd consider more in the SMB tier in many ways, and then you go all the way up to things like ExactTarget, Responsys, etc. at the Enterprise level. Even then there's considerations around pricing models that depends on whether you're more of a low-volume, high-touch B2B business, or high-volume B2C for example.

Definitely helpful to demo several providers and compare them against a business/technical needs assessment matrix, of which pricing is probably just one factor (and perhaps not even the most important).

I use mailchimp at work, it's feature full, but seems to be struggling with our list size, and isn't the cheapest.

Are there any cheaper solutions out there that have similar feature sets (including split testing campaigns), and are designed to scale to list sizes greater that 1m?

I'm curious--If you were in charge of rebuilding Mailchimp from scratch, how would it function and what would it do differently?

> our list size

What's order of magnitude is it?

We recently moved from Constant Contact to MailChimp ... to save money. I guess maybe on a large scale it's expensive?

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