Ask HN: Cheapest and simplest solution for a daily email alert to myself?

3 points·benrapscallion··6 comments

I want to have a cloud-hosted, daily email with RSS feeds, stock prices, weather, web page changes, etc. The idea is to run a few scripts (Python) and then compile the results into an email that hits my inbox every day. I have heard people mention DigitalOcean and other similar solutions to doing this quickly. Any ideas?

Beautiful HTML formatting would be a huge plus.

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Imo, Google Apps Script is the simplest (fully hosted/serverless, JavaScript SDK, integrated scheduler and mailer, Google Sheets integration) that I've come across so far for building low-code scripted tools, and cheapest too (free).

https://developers.google.com/apps-script

A python script that uses an html template to send an email if very simple to write. The bigger job is probably to scrape the data, though that's also simple if you know specifically what you want from a given source.

Isn't sending out SMTP or whatever something hard to set up safely? Or are some cloud providers providing an API or something? I was under the impression you can't just write a script to blast out emails like you can say, SYN packets

There are cloud providers, I have personal experience using sendgrid.

For small scale / personal stuff you can use gmail's SMTP.

https://support.google.com/a/answer/176600?product_name=UnuF...

Firebase free tier, you can create an scheduled function that runs your python code and sends the email.

Super easy to deploy and it is set and forget.

I'm sure you can fit your use cade in the free tier.

If it really has to be cloud hosted then sounds like you could run your scripts in a VM in free tier of AWS/Azure

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