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Comment by sudonim | Hacker News Reader

Other than spammers, who is concerned about sending email newsletters cheaper? Your service looks like a great tool, but I'd encourage you to ask your early users why they like using you. I'd guess that "It's cheaper than mailchimp" won't be the answer you hear.

+ You don't really want to tout yourself as the low-cost-option. You have nowhere to go but down.

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Sending to 1,000,000 subscribers costs $55,000+ per year on MailChimp and other premium services. A cheaper option with the same deliverability would be extremely attractive to anyone who doesn't like setting their money on fire!

Exactly this... People seem to jump on the bandwagon of SaaS services and don't really realize that, as a business, you should be trying to minimize expenses and maximize profit. Granted there is flexibility here in the products you use -- ie, the feature/cost tradeoff needs to make sense, but the fact remains, every $1 of money the company saves helps the company last longer, increases its chance at a future, and benefits both the employees and investors (if there are any). People seem to get sidetracked in our industry a lot of times on this startup mantra that makes people feel like their company is a failure if it doesn't buy everyone an Aeron, have a quirky office in SOMA, and utilize all the hot startup tech services that exist.

Your biggest expense as a company is employees. Every purchasing decision that won't keep you alive for another month is a decision that isn't worth thinking about.

"I could switch from A to B and save $100 a month". Each human being in your startup costs $5000 - $10,000 a month in salary excl. benefits. Saving $150 a month on mailchimp is chump change.

Definitely true... I was speaking to the example of spending $50k/yr on mailchimp with 1,000,000 subscribers. If you're only dropping $150, then it's not as big of a deal.

We're talking MailChimp/Campaign Monitor VS Amazon SES, if we're comparing MailChimp/Campaign Monitor VS sending emails from you own server as a cheaper alternative, then there is no reason for Sendy to exist.

Yes Amazon SES is way cheaper, but it does not mean it's of lesser quality than other more expensive services. Deliverability rates are comparable and at times, higher when compared against Campaign Monitor in our tests when building Sendy.

We see high potential in SES, such great quality at such low price. The only drawback is there is no UI for newsletter campaigns. So we built it and hopefully the general public who'd like to send newsletters but aren't too technically inclined (or are too busy to figure) can take advantage of Amazon SES through Sendy.

The only reason why it's a one time fee of $40 is because it's self hosted.

Paying mail chimp $150 a month to manage sending to a list of 25k users or more is a cost many folk would prefer not to have. I doubt this is any sort of take over the world project for the author, but it's certainly a useful project that I think many folk would be happy to compensate him for.

"who is concerned about [doing something] cheaper"??

Really? That's your question? And by "cheaper" it is meant "99.0%-99.5% cheaper"?

I'm skeptical that the main value of the product to end users is that it's cheaper. Do you own an iPhone? Did you buy it because it's the cheapest way to have a phone in your pocket?

On hacker news, people seem to care about pinching pennies on marketing emails, but in the real world where people have real businesses that make real money, the cheapest is not going to win the fight.

> On hacker news, people seem to care about pinching pennies on marketing emails, but in the real world where people have real businesses that make real money, the cheapest is not going to win the fight.

Oh, tell that to envato[1]. Most companies don't have deep pockets and unlimited budgets.

[1] http://graphicriver.net/ http://photodune.net/ People seem to buy stuff there even though istcokphoto exists.

You're comparing newsletter delivery to iPhones? I didn't say price is the only parameter. I was responding to the inane comment that people don't care about cost.

Which real world do you live in? Real businesses spend a good percentage of their efforts in cutting costs. And if they have a large consumer base they push newsletters too, then yes, as an agency, I can tell you that a lot of clients will make the switch.

There a bunch of open source self-hosted newsletter systems doing well (oh, and they're mostly subpar). I like the direction in which sendy is heading and with the amazon ses edge to it, its a great great idea. If sendy would throw in a few more features like multi-user login and access control, I'll make the switch and will convince a few of my clients too.

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