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Comment by Raed667 | Hacker News Reader

I'm not minimizing the amount of effort it takes to curate links, but does a mailing list need to constantly grow for it to be viable ? What does it mean to "operate at a loss" in this case ?

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My first guess is ESP pricing. Just to pull numbers out of thin air to anchor the conversation, mailing to 20,000 subscribers costs $200–$400/mo at Mailchimp/ConvertKit/Klaviyo, three of the top choices in the space. If it's 50,000 subscribers, that's $380–$800/mo.

These are email marketing platforms, not bulk transaction email platforms, and I don't see why they can't do with the latter. At a bulk transaction platform, such a tiny amount would cost at most $20-$50/mo. If you're willing to do a bit of work to use AWS SES, that would be $2-$5 a month. Azure ACS would be even cheaper.

How much does it cost if you make your SMTP server connect to their SMTP servers and exchange mail?

Every bulk transactional email provider I could find* allows SMTP relay even in the basic/free plans. That feature seems to come for free everywhere.

* e.g. SendGrid, Postmark, mailjet, mailgun, mailerroo, etc.

Just playing devils advocate, but why not just switch to posting on a free hosted blog platform? The information can be there for all to see, it doesnt need to be distributed directly into mailboxes by premium mailer services.

I have no idea whether the hosting is free, but they already have an online archive [1].

Either way, "free hosting" doesn't cover the time required to produce each issue.

If you're happy to do such ongoing work without recompense, please consider starting a successor.

[1] https://ecmascript.news/archive.html

The parent comment I was replying to was talking about the cost of distributing a mailing list via email. I was replying to that, no need for snark.

You can send emails for free if you don't use some bullshit platform, no?

You can send emails without these platforms, but your emails very likely will not be recieved if you do.

Email is an incredibly broken technology.

You could just notify the user to add you to their contact list. Like :

  Emails will be sent from feed@example.com. If you're not seeing any email, please check your spam inbox and add this address to your contact list,...[rest of notice].

If you’re not seeing the email in the first place, you’re not seeing the “fix.”

The message should be in the subscribe page, not in an email.

Wait, but then they wouldn't be able to subscribe you to their shit without your consent.

Seems obvious that it wasn't generating enough money to make it a viable venture for the person putting in the work.

> The number of advertisers and subscribers has been slowly but steadily decreasing

This does not entail that they need "constant growth" to be viable.

it costs money to send a lot of emails that aren't immediately blocked or sent to the junk folder

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