The open source Mailchimp alternative | Hacker News Reader

The open source Mailchimp alternative

github.com

31 pointspollux0121 comments

Heyo! I'm Afi, I have been working on Bespoke for the past 8 months. I have a good feeling about Bespoke and I think it can only reach it's true potential if it's only open source. My thoughts are below.

Bespok's ultimate goals are as follows: -To engage in personalized marketing -To be trusted, because we do personlization

When we mention personalization, it involves gathering extensive user data, such as their behavior, purchase history, and browsing preferences. We understand that handling such sensitive information might lead to concerns about intrusion into users' privacy.

To establish trust in our system and demonstrate our transparent data collection practices, we have no choice but to open-source our software. By adopting an open-source approach, we can gain a competitive advantage in terms of trustworthiness and reliability.

Another crucial aspect of our long-term goal is to become a platform that facilitates data collection for any software operating on the internet. We aim to challenge the narratives surrounding companies like Facebook, TikTok, Google, etc., which have been criticized for exploiting user data to benefit advertisers. We believe that our approach can bring about a positive change, providing advertisers with an alternative platform where everything is conducted openly, instilling greater trust in the system among users.

I think the path forward towards the stated goals above is to start with a Mailchimp alternative. And eventually become the open source personlization marketing platform.

Hope you guys self host it today or sign up to check it out! Don't forget to give us a star on github!

MIT Licenced!

>MIT Licenced!

...said Afi and the very next day the license gets changed to AGPL-3.0

https://github.com/bespoke-surf/bespoke/commit/434dffe407b8a...

Yeah, ppl said it's a bad idea, and then one of the commentors said to change it, so I did.

btw im unable to edit that comment tho, ohh, i should have added an update, sorry

Update! Not MIT anymore, its AGPL3 now.

Self hosting email generally sucks because of all of the block lists and anti spam - how does this project help avoid that? I think one of the selling points of MailChimp is they handle this side of the house for bulk mailing but I am not a user or the target market so I could be way off.

Ohh yup, you are correct, to solve this problem, we don't do our own email server but use an external service. Right now Bespoke uses AWS SES to send emails. To self host it you need an AWS SES account. We have added a guide in the docs on how to do that easily.

In the future we might make it much more simple, so you can just opt into any smtp service and start sending emails.

Could you please add Mailgun or better yet, a way for us to write our own adapters / plugins to our own existing mail APIs and infra?

Yes! I would want that too, the blocking thing here are adding open, click, delivered events.

SES and Sendgrid makes this easy, listening to webhooks. We have to write our own wrapper.

Hopefully after next week. This weeks plans are to finish campaigns and segmentation and also create a Shopify Cutom app guide.

Having licensing based upon environment variable value is very odd. From the readme:

> Bespoke is MIT licensed for env variabe OPEN_SOURCE=true

> Bespoke Cloud is Business Source Licenced for env variable OPEN_SOURCE=false

> You will be violating our Business Source Licence if you have the environment variable OPEN_SOURCE=false

I would personally be uncomfortable using any software licensed in this manner, since you're not licensing the code itself, but the code in a particular environment. It's also pretty useless to add this complexity since the usage of that environment variable could easily be patched out while under use of your "OPEN_SOURCE=true" conditions.

Yeah! go for it! no problem patching it out!

Right now this was the only method I could come up with to release thing faster. I might think this through a little longer.

Thanks for the feedback :)

Consider whether you might want to release it as AGPL3, and offer a proprietary license for a fee.

That prevents a private company from forking a closed source version without paying you.

I thought the community hates AGPL3. I'm not sure why forking and setting env varaible as OPEN_SOURCE=true would be a hard thing to do.

They do, because many in HN are entrepreneurs building platforms that don't want to open source their products that incorporate your code.

What authors don't realize is that they can still do that if you let them pay for a non GPL version.

I made it AGPL3 after your suggestion. Now everyone is happy I suppose

> Kalvioy

It's Klaviyo that you're talking about?

Did i spell it wrong! haha! sorry

omg i wonder what all bugs are there just like this :p

fixed it! :)

not going to join your discord

hehe! just join if you have any issue while deploying or if you see any bugs :). will galdly help!

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