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Comment by Zealotux | Hacker News Reader

Mailchimp/Mandrill is pretty expensive, but designing emails without a solid WYSIWYG editor is just too painful for my taste. Are there good, cheaper alternatives out there for transactional email and newsletters with good delivery?

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I like EmailOctopus Connect.[0] It includes a WYSIWYG editor, but it sends outgoing mail through your own Amazon SES account, so it stays affordable even with large lists. They also have a non-SES offering which costs a little more.[1]

They're also bootstrapped and independent. They have a really easy to use API[2] (other providers have horrifically inscrutable APIs[3]). The customer service used to be excellent since you were talking directly to the founders. Now they've outsourced customer support so that's not as good, but I still like them far more than any other email service provider.

[0] https://emailoctopus.com/pricing-connect

[1] https://emailoctopus.com/pricing

[2] https://emailoctopus.com/api-documentation

[3] https://docs.bigmailer.io/reference#updatecontact

Postmark is the gold standard for transactional emails. They have the best deliverability since they don't mix marketing emails.

No true anymore.

Postmark has been doing bulk emailing since 2019.

https://postmarkapp.com/blog/api-bulk-the-final-frontier

They say in that blogpost that they do separate transactional and bulk email:

> Q: How will you maintain high deliverability for transactional email?

> A: Separating transactional traffic from other types of email using different sending IPs and From domains is a longstanding best practice for ensuring optimal deliverability.

...

> That means transactional and broadcast traffic never intersect in Postmark, including IP ranges.

https://postmarkapp.com/blog/api-bulk-the-final-frontier#how...

I feel you. Designing emails should be easy, not painful. If you're after a solid WYSIWYG editor and actually great customer support, MailerSend may just be your option for your transactional emails (https://www.mailersend.com/). And MailerLite for newsletters with the best deliverability. Keeping both transactional and marketing emails separate helps you in building and maintaining a good sending reputation. Disclosure: I work for the parent company, but have done a lot of competitor research — MailerSend provides the best prices that you'll see in this space (12,000 emails/month for the free plan and US$25 for 50,000 emails/m to give you an idea) and we actually care and like to implement on the customer feedback we receive. If you end up trying it, never hesitate to reach out to our team, more than happy to help!

I'd like to introduce you to our lord and savior MJML: https://mjml.io It's a HTML-like language that lets you create email templates without much pain, and compiles to HTML understandable by email clients.

We had to migrate from Mailchimp when they started bumping up their plans. We did our research and Mailerlite[1] was our choice, and we've been a customer for a couple of years now.

1: https://www.mailerlite.com/

I'm working to build a good WYSIWYG email editor at https://postheat.com/create

What about Sendgrid†? They have a good WYSIWYG editor and fairly reasonable price points [0] in my experience.

† now owned by Twilio

[0] https://sendgrid.com/pricing/

I'm using Campaign Monitor for newsletters and Sendgrid for transactional. I design the emails using MJML or export with Emailify after designing in Figma (amazing!).

Constant Contact is still independent. Its WYSIWYG is just fine and comes out a little cheaper for me.

FWIW, I wouldn't recommend Constant Contact to anyone. Simple reason is that you need to call their support line to cancel subscription.

Source: https://community.constantcontact.com/t5/Get-Help/Billing-FA...

I did that, wasn’t painful. On the other hand, Mailchimp expired unused credits I had to send emails. I know it’s the way of the world, but digital credits shouldn’t expire.

HTTPS://mautic.org

HTML is for web pages. Email should be plain text.

My partner's one-person service business sends out monthly availability emails to her small list of eager customers. Plain text would not suit her image and brand at all. You are saying she should send a plain text email with a link to a webpage? It sounds like you have no understanding of a business like hers.

Yes that's what I'm saying. I realize many don't agree, but I'm also very convinced I'm right.

I’ve learned over the decades, that “being right” is rather irrelevant when it comes to communication patterns. Language changes and communication patterns, technologies, and how they are used constantly evolve (for better or worse).

While I also would prefer email to be text only, it seems most of the world feels differently. So I stopped worrying about it.

Side note: In theory an HTML email can be more visibly respectful of privacy while being nicely formatted, than visiting a webpage, although in practice that distinction seems increasingly rare.

With you on that for sure, but after years of seeing it the return on HTML emails good and bad is still just too good to ignore. Still great marketing return etc. And with mobile having evolved the way it has and even browser engines/mail clients becoming much more adept, HTML emails (designing them obviously still painful but it's marginally better than 10 years ago), are still working for millions of ppl. And I suppose that leads into some of what this deal is about (other reasons being integration and data etc)

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