Hacker News Reader

Comment by bhouston | Hacker News Reader

I switched away from MailChimp to Sendy and it is way cheaper. MailChimp is stupidly expensive, annoyingly so, and it doesn't add much value over Sendy.

View on HN

That's a bit over the top. Mail chimp is hugely valuable if you are in their target user base. And for non-technical clients, mail chimp is (imo) a massive step up from other mailing list providers.

If you have 100,000 users (which we have), MailChimp is really expensive.

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.

If I'm reading the FAQ correct, SES maxes out at 10k emails/day, meaning it'll take you 10 days to email your entire list.

http://docs.aws.amazon.com/ses/latest/DeveloperGuide/request...

http://docs.aws.amazon.com/ses/latest/DeveloperGuide/manage-...

That's just in the beginning. As your volume increases and your stats are ok (low bounces and complaints) you can ask for a quota increase (+ speed increase) which is usually granted. It'll take a few days until you are up and running with a bigger list.

Clearly it depends on your business and how you measure the value. I've worked for companies that spent over $5k/mo on Mailchimp and thought it quite worth it.

Right. How much is it to have someone on staff (or available for calling up in an emergency) who knows how to configure mail servers? Far more than 5k/month.

If that's their only job, sure. I know mail servers. I also know the rest of our stack, and that's my primary job.

Or, as noted throughout this thread, just use SES (or Mandrill if SES's deliverability scares you, but IMO it shouldn't).

What's your experience with Sendy? Please let us know!

I have been using it for almost 1.5 years and really like it. It takes a moment to set up and has way less features than Mailchimp (less third party integrations, segmentation features etc.), but the price is awesome and Amazon SES is also very cheap. I haven't been using it with Digital Ocean (so don't know how well that works).

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com