OwlSend – Email marketing for small business | Hacker News Reader

OwlSend – Email marketing for small business

owlsend.com

38 pointscnyeve33 comments

Hmm, the setup looks like you're claiming to be the cheapest - MailChimp have a free tier and CM have an $8 tier. It seems a bit dishonest to me.

If you need to pick the 10,000 emails level before you can compete on price then I think I'd be more inclined to lead with USP or just with benefits (ignoring the competition).

That said it looks nice and is easy to navigate. Might be worth saying that account creation is free (CM highlight it with "create free account" as button text) - having a paid lowest tier can make it seem you have to pay to even log in. MailChimp don't ask for my Full Name right off the bat, I'd save that until someone is initiating a campaign as I think it increases friction with those who just want to fiddle and get a feel with the app first.

The email builder needs some descriptive pointers and/or a video walkthrough. It's fine for me, but things like double-click on an image and it just opening a "file upload" dialog could confuse users. It's not necessarily obvious that it's just a template; presumably you'll add other templates later?

Nice work.

Thanks for the feedback. We're the cheapest if you have 10,000 subscribers or more.

Good point in regards to saying account creation is free.

Then perhaps you should be clear and change "Cost 10,000 Emails" to say "Cost 10,000 Subscribers". I can send 10,000 emails for free (12,000 actually) each month using Mandrill. Make it clear you're talking about subscribers and not emails.

Also, if I check MailChimp pricing, 10,000 subscribers costs $75 / month.

EDIT: When I saw 10,000 emails I honestly thought 10,000 emails which would make your pricing not that great.

Also, where'd you get your owl logo, looks very similar to Robly's (who is probably your "closest" competitor)

Thanks for your feedback. I will try to make that data more clear for everyone.

If you see the "Pay as you go" section in MailChimp, it is indeed $200 for 10,000 emails.

OwlSend is $30 for sending 10,000 emails.

There's no reason to compare the pay as you go option if you are charging per subscriber and they have an option to pay per subscriber as well. Right on the MailChimp pricing page is a calculator that will tell you straight up it's $75/mo for 10,000 subscribers and unlimited emails. Sure, you are much cheaper but it's not a fair comparison to say you are charging $30 and they are charging $200 when really there's a $75 option that most people would be smart enough to find and take advantage of.

If I have 10,000 subscribers and I send a daily email so 300,000 emails a month do I pay $30 or $59 using OwlSend?

If I send a morning and an evening email (600,000 per month) do I pay $30 or $89 per month?

I'm confused because in your comparison chart you say $30 to send 10,000 emails. Your pricing says $29 / month. Your FAQ talks about "How much does it cost? Owlsend application charges a flat fee of $29 upto 10,000 subscribers, $49 for upto 50,000 subscribers and $79 for upto 100,000 subscribers. You can send unlimited bulk emails with Owlsend every month. Amazon SES costs $1 per 10,000 emails sent."

So is it $29 + $1 for that first 10000 emails? If not, why are you talking about SES and how much SES costs? SES [costs] should be a non factor and not even mentioned.

EDIT: In the Pricing section it says "Send Unlimited Emails to 10,000 Subscribers" again, am I still paying $1 per 10,000 emails above the $29 / month just to use your interface?

Yes, It is $29 for 10,000 subscribers + $1 per 10,000 email sent via Amazon SES.

Here is a simple calculation. If you send 5 broadcasts to all your audience of 10,000 people.

It would be $29 + $5 = $34

Here $29 is a recurring cost and $5 is a variable cost depending upon number of emails sent any month. Amazon SES charges $1 per 10,000 emails through them.

The landing page looks great. Very well designed. The UI looks good but I have a few comments as I have been dealing with Email Marketing lately and have come across some pain points. If you are using SES, how will you manage reputation and hourly/daily quota issues ? Are you going to show the reputation to the users in some way ? If a user gets marked as spam a lot, their reputation suffers which means they will not be able to send a lot of emails within the same hour/day and this needs to be explained to the user properly. A lot of clients don't understand this and will say "hey my campaign is paused, what happened".

Also, what integrations are available with services such as wordpress etc ? The reason I am asking because your tool seems to be targeted at smaller business to start with and quite a few of them use CMS such as wordpress and want integration. So standalone app is great but a lot of people will want to integrate with their existing CMS etc.

That takes me to the next point. This is not a criticism but just some food for thought. You are charging $30 for 10,000 emails which on surface looks great comparing with Mailchimp etc but there are plenty of plugins in the market that can provide similar UI, autoresponders etc and let users use Mandrill in the backend which lets you send 12,000 emails per month for free. Yes that quota is 12,000 but that is still a lot for most starters.

Hi codegeek,

Thanks a lot for taking time to post your feedback.

Currently we extract data in realtime of users sending limits and emails sent by users in a day via SES API.

Since, we are already extracting all the users data and showing them in their dashboard. We will certainly plan to show the reputation to the users in the later stage as well.

We are working quite extensively on WordPress platform. What kind of integration would you be willing to get ?

Yes, you are right there are lot of plugins which provide the similar services, however there are few challenges. 1. You have to manage the hosting at your end. 2. You have to keep track on plugins and external apps and keep them updated. 3. There are not a robust solution out there, some don't have a simple drag drop email builder, others don't have a subscriber management system, some plugins don't track accurately and some don't provide web form embedding functionality or some plugins don't have autoresponders.

I am not saying that self hosted solution are all bad but there are certain limits where those solutions don't work well.

Mandrill is awesome, it gives 12,000 emails for free every month. However, they restrict their service to be used only for transactional emails and recommend MailChimp for marketing emails. On the other hand, SES has no such limitations whatsoever.

At the same time, if you are an Amazon EC2 customer, SES gives you 65,000 free emails every month.

We are actually coming up with a way to send emails via your custom SMTP to allow email sending via Mandrill or any other SMTP platform as well.

Once again, thanks a lot for taking time to post your feedback. I would suggest you to give OwlSend a try, I am pretty sure you will love it. If you have any questions or suggestions. Feel free to email me at neeraj[at]owlsend.com

Thanks Neeraj, OwlSend Team

...Is this built by the same company behind SendOwl? https://www.sendowl.com

No this has nothing to do with sendowl

Hi bdunn,

No this is a new product altogether. We are unrelated.

This is very confusing - you might want to think about another name or at least changing your design.

The name, logo and theme/color-scheme are all very similar to sendowl. So much so that I assumed that this was another project by the sendowl team until I saw this comment.

I am the founder of SendOwl and this is not a project by us. It's clearly ripped off our brand though. Will be getting in touch with them to discuss the matter immediately.

Very surprised to see this. Hope it gets sorted out quickly... this is really quite appalling.

This needs to have simple plugin modules for ecommerce software and content management systems. Otherwise, why bother? Truth be told, getting the newsletter signup to work is a low priority for developers that have to do such things, so rolling one's own integration just is not going to happen.

There also need to be 'free' accounts for developer use. You don't want to be paying $$$ a month when you are merely testing if a newsletter sign up box works and on-boards the customer nicely.

Free accounts can be limited to a mailing list of 5. That is ample for test porpoises.

One thing that irks me about many email newsletter service things is that they think that their software is the centre of the universe. When integrated into something else, e.g. an ecommerce store or a blog, it is the ecommerce software or the blog software which is the 'centre of the universe'. There is really no need to strip as much as possible information about the site visitors and their spending habits, to then bring this into some glorified email contrivance.

I am quite surprised that this market exists for 'we can send email for you' services. Any computer is capable of sending an email, that is how it should be.

I'm curious about autoresponders. The landing page says that you can setup an initial autoresponder which is great, but to get the most out of email marketing you need to setup a series of autoresponders to guide customers through things.

So am I able to do that?

Also, can I have multiple lists or do I need a separate account for each list?

I'd love to hear your thoughts on our email app. We've created a stunning email builder to help you craft beautiful emails to reach your customers.

Are people able to export their list? I'm looking for something like this but no way I'm signing up if I'm locked in.

Hi Dan,

There are no lock-ins whatsoever. If you like to move over to somewhere else in the later stage. Just send us one email at hoot[at]owlsend.com and we will send you the export of all your contacts.

Thanks Neeraj OwlSend Team

Unless there’s a button or link to export the data, it’s still locked in. Having to ask for permission – “please can I have my own data to leave your service” – is not acceptable.

If you are running a business and your team handles email marketing for your business, having a simple export button in the email marketing application is not a good idea.

Better option in my opinion is to have a simple export request form and send the export directly to the admin email address.

As long as it’s automated and is sent immediately, sure, that’s perfectly fine.

Nice Sendy alternative, the auto responder looks pretty cool. Good job

Yeh with Sendy you need to install it and configure it on your hosting. You also need to update it every time new features get released. With OwlSend we take care of all the hosting for you. All you need to do is log in to the OwlSend app and away you go. All new features are free for customers.

We're really focusing on making sending emails and managing email campaigns easy and simple.

True, BUT, with Sendy one is not married to SES, any SMTP server can be used.

We are also coming up with that capability in couple of weeks.

Tried the email builder, loved it.

Awesome! Thanks for the feedback.

Your landing page looks amazing!

"Send Unlimited Emails To 100,000 Subscribers - $79"

So this is a spam service. OK, we need to develop a filter to mark all OwlSend email as spam.

If you have a "newsletter" that people actually want, use RSS to distribute it. Then, they can unsubscribe when they want, and you can't stop them. Otherwise, you're just another spammer.

Do you really consider all email based newsletters "spam"?

I cant think of a entity (govt/business/education) that doesn't use email marketing....

"Do you really consider all email based newsletters "spam"?"

If they're from a commercial entity and contain marketing material, of course they're spam. Why would I want marketing material in my inbox?

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