Create your own MailChimp clone for $5 a month with Sendy
davekiss.com
davekiss.com
It doesn't have the slick, "just works" appeal of MailChimp, but it also doesn't carry the big monthly price tag.
We've had the same open and clickthrough rates with Sendy as before, and I haven't encountered any problems getting marked as spam. That said, our entire list is people who actively came to the site and signed up for updates.
If price were no object, we'd go back to MailChimp in a heartbeat. But they were charging us $125/month just to keep our mailing list on the service, whether we sent anything that month or not. Just not a good use of funds for us at this stage. Sendy is great at our current size.
12.000 mails on Amazon SES are only slightly above 1$ (+ Sendy hosting of course). So the question is if Mailchimp offers features that save them 200$ worth of time.
Sendy has worked perfectly for us. The UI could do with a lot of love, but its functionally fine.
There is no real difference in cost to the transactions themselves (to an extent, and in this example). You are willing to pay to have the ability to transact, regardless of the size. The whole point here is that your 10K is more valuable than their 1K, therefore you would in theory pay more to have the ability to transact (regardless of # of transactions). I agree though - its gouging for no reason.
It has a built-in delivery service, but can also plug into SES or any other SMTP service for a one-time fee.
[1] I am a developer of the aforementioned app
EDIT I realized I made a blanket claim and didn't provide any details. So I'll try to explain.
No framework, little shared code between files. Warnings and deprecations ignored, poor variable names, db queries mixed right in with html output, user id's imploded from array and stored into a single database field, etc.
Just lots and lots of rough PHP.
This isn't software to be used for analysis. Sendy is f-in awesome! I've used it for a list of over 25k and it hasn't failed me once. Like others have said, it's not as brain dead as Mailchimp, but I wasn't expecting it to be. The developer is great and it just works(tm). The price is awesome too.
I looked through the source and thought, sure, it's not computer science that was built on the latest "Framework X", but it worked fine. To me it signaled, they we're just getting shit done. God, I'm so over the days of analysis paralysis "proper framework" development (that's for another rant I guess).
Please, pay no mind to the parent post. If you're looking for an alternative to AWeber (I'm not saying it's got as many features as Aweber) or Mailchimp, then Sendy is awesome.
I've been hosting mine on a Digital Ocean 1GB server for about 7 months and it's worked flawlessly. Their 2.0 upgrade went without a hitch. Couldn't recommend this app more.
Sending email to a list is easy. Sending email to a list securely is harder.
We use Sendy at work, 40k+ sends weekly. It saves us boat loads of money since moving from Mailchimp. It's a nice thing to have.
However, we had hoped to extend it's tooling and customize, but that's right out. I've rewritten the CSV import code because it reads in the entire file, twice, before processing. I found some bugs where it can silently drop lines of your import. That's not "f-n awesome", it's bad software.
These are real things. The default Sendy setup can drop tracking opens because it doesn't access it atomically. These aren't "computer science" issues, they are evidence of a lack of competent design.
We've forked it, patched it, and use it internally, but only because it's cheaper than writing our own, for now.
Don't dismiss warnings. I'm not telling you not to buy it, I'm telling you that the guts are shitty and you should know that before you fork over cash.
MailChimp for newsletters and SendGrid for everything else. That's a winning combo.
From my understanding, and having used Mandrill for some time, it can be used for anything you want (that follows its double opt-in, no spam requirements).
"Use Mandrill to send automated one-to-one email like password resets and welcome messages, as well as marketing emails and customized newsletters."
Emphasis on the "as well as marketing emails and customized newsletters" section there.
The difference of Mandril is that is doesn't have all the fancy features of Mailchip that people "would expect" to create a newsletter etc so Mandril is aimed at developers/software etc. That does not mean you can not use it for same uses as Mailchimp though.
Huh?
Are you sure you have configured it correctly, including DKIM?
We're using SES a lot (both transactional and campaigns) and never had a problem with deliverability.
There are too many spammers using it.
That seems unlikely considering the default sending limit is a mere 10k mails/day (iirc) and I doubt Amazon lets you raise that when your complaint-inbox is overflowing...
The delivery rates of the big ones could be overrated.
I built SimplerSES for the same reason - a cheaper alternative to MailChimp using AWS SES. It's built as a hosted service so theres no server costs, and you only pay for the emails you send out.
All the OP links have affiliates codes. (namecheap, digital ocean, sendy).
I should just set up a referral program myself and let others do it for me :p
Try out the service and drop me a line, I'm sure I can accommodate your use case :)
If you try it out and find something you need missing, drop me a line and I'll see what I can do!
10,000/24hrs at a rate of 5 emails per second.
If your list is decent sized, say 50,000 it would take over 2.5 hours to send your newsletter. Beyond that, MailChimp deals with IP whitelisting, blacklisting, scalability, SPF, DKIM, and the bevy of other e-mail sending nightmares.
If you're looking for a hosted alternative to Sendy, please take a look at a project I've been working on for the last year or so: https://emailoctopus.com
We're not currently charging anything (still working out a pricing model!) so you only have to pay your SES fees. And as it's hosted on EC2 instances, you'll still get your first 62,000 emails a month under Amazon's free tier.
This is going to be the part that scares most people away. But you are ready. You can do this. We're in this together, and with the power of two we can do anything! Besides, all you really need is to be good at following linear instructions.
I really like how you are coaching the reader through the 'instruction manual' stuff.
Great alternative (sort of like aweber with good design & active development + a focus on building autoresponders).
It's designed for "full featured" more than "cheap."
Worth noting that with Amazon SES, if you want to send more than 10,000 emails in a day, you'll need to apply (to Amazon) for approval.
I would stick with Sendy, but I could never get the unsubscribe links to work, and it doesn't automatically insert any footers, like a spam compliance. Also, there was no way to edit someone's email who was on multiple lists, without checking each list to see if they were on it, and manually editing, which was taking me hours. Couldn't do it through the API either. Their support is great for what seems like a one-man show.
My Internet marketing friends suggest going with the self-hosted mailing software, OEMPro, and setting it up to work with SendGrid. They say SendGrid vets and ages their IPs before giving them to you, so they provide better deliver rates than MailChimp, though you need to do some custom integration to clean your list of bounces, etc. However, OEMPro has the WORST support I've ever encountered. I was a client with them a decade ago and left in frustration because of their support, and found it to be just as bad in 2015, when it took them 3 months to let me know I wasn't eligible for the upgrade price.
Mailchimp: if price isn't an issue for you, use Mailchimp. Period. The deliverability and customer service is unmatched. The interface is easy to use. No setup. High customization with merge tags. If you're sending a lot of emails and want them to "just get delivered without any hassle", use this.
Sendy: it's a lighter version of Mailchimp and super cheap. Much less customization. No live support (but the guy responds to his email really fast and always helpful). Configuration is a bit painful (you have to setup SES, wait 1-2 days for domain approval, install Sendy, etc), but once you set it up, it's a breeze to use. I haven't noticed any deliverability issues, but supposedly it's less reliable than more established email senders. If you just run a personal newsletter.
I use SendGrid free on Azure because Azure VPS too have an extremely high bounce rate. Setting up an SMTP server isn't exactly hard or expensive (regardless of if you're integrating mailing lists or not), it is the good rep' IP address and making it "someone else's problem" to deal with a lot of email related problems (poor reputation, blacklists, random host decides to block you, etc) that you're paying for.
Sendgrid, Mailchimp, and so on primarily exist so you can just hit send and then that's as deep as your involvement goes as far as emails.
I do. Gmail spam-flagged the messages for a while, but after a couple of months it learned they're not spam. Surprisingly, other email providers (yahoo, ms, aol) never batted an eye.
I just made sure that the IP address assigned to my droplet is not in any blacklist, and configured proper SPF/DKIM headers (not hard with postfix).
My referral link: http://www.sendyhosting.com/?utm_source=tagsforlikes&utm_med...
Details: http://mailchimp.com/pricing/high-volume/
Mailchimp is thus $475.00 per 100K per month ($5700 per year!) That is a lot to spend on just email.
With Sendy + SES it costs me $10 to do a send to our 100,000 users.
Now I could play around with switching plans all the time at MailChimp to try and always minimize my costs, but I don't want to play that game. SES + Sendy keeps my costs linear with the number of emails I send, I don't have to play any games with changing plans, and it is significantly cheaper that MailChimp.
Or, as noted throughout this thread, just use SES (or Mandrill if SES's deliverability scares you, but IMO it shouldn't).
Amazon SES also has very good IPs. If you check them on https://senderscore.org you will see they usually rank above 95%. The only problem is Amazon SES strict policy against bounces and complaints. So your list has to be very clean and ideally double opt-in before you can send. Also Amazon SES starts you out with 10k emails/day and 5emails/sec. You need to ask for a quota increase (which was always granted in my experience) before sending higher volume faster.
My tip: If you have some old/invalid emails that you know will cause problems with Amazon SES, send to your most active (recent openers and clickers) first and then gradually introduce your older emails. Monitor your bounce and complaint rates to stay below 5% and 0.1% respectively.
I use their python api, hooked a Django project with Html editor (ckeditor) and bang.
Magic Formula = Django + Mandrill app + django-ckeditor
Sending more than 1 000 000 mails by month (reaching 1.7M now).
It is fast, it works. The main problem: to reach the support you should use twitter and talk to the monkey.
:)
Or you could just use the free Sendgrid plan for up to 12k emails a month :)
I just love those guys. They even check that you installed everything correctly for you.
Canada is having a crackdown on spam. "CRTC Chief Compliance and Enforcement Officer issues $1.1 million penalty to Compu-Finder for spamming Canadians" ... "Compu-Finder sent commercial electronic messages without the recipient’s consent as well as emails in which the unsubscribe mechanisms did not function properly. The emails sent by Compu-Finder promoted various training courses to businesses, often related to topics such as management, social media and professional development."
The next time you consider "informing people about your webinar" via email, remember that.
The Canadian laws (despite being irrelevant in this conversation) prevent against e-mails _without consent_ and _without unsubscribe mechanisms_. Coincidentally, those are the same requirements of 99% of all blacklists and spam tools that differentiate spam from marketing campaigns.
By your definition, MailChimp is a spam tool too.
Under Canadian law, it is now illegal to have a "send newsletter" checkbox checked by default. That's not "consent".