We've got about 12,000 people on our announce list. I switched us over to Sendy three months ago.
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.
We switched to Sendy too, because MailChimp's pricing leaves a lot to be desired. We have a list of about 10k subscribers, and we only send a campaign every 2-3 months. I have no idea why this is priced way higher than someone with 1k subscribers would sends 4 campaigns a month.
Sendy has worked perfectly for us. The UI could do with a lot of love, but its functionally fine.
Think of a bank - you may pay to have a business bank account. An account with $10K that does 1 transaction every 2-3 months, vs An account with $1K that does 4 transactions every month.
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.
They have, but it would cost the GP $240 per mailing to all 12.000 users (0.02 per mail).
12.000 mails on Amazon SES are only slightly above 1$ (+ Sendy hosting of course). So the question is if Mailchimp offers features that save them 200$ worth of time.
The Sendy codebase is horrifying. It's not good. Buyer beware.
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.
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.
A poor codebase makes it hard to audit it to make sure there aren't bugs or exploits. In the case of Sendy, how would a user know that a spammer isn't able to exploit it to send spam to everyone in Sendy's MySQL database? That's potentially very damaging to a business (especially if you're running Sendy on behalf of a client).
Sending email to a list is easy. Sending email to a list securely is harder.
I'm late to the reply here, so sorry to have missed the discussion.
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.
While I can't provide an accurate basis for this, from the sounds of it, I imagine that Sendy wasn't originally intended for "traditional marketing" emails.
Amazon SES rocks from a pricing standpoint but deliverability isn't its strong suit. There are too many spammers using it. ISPs seem to barely trust mail sent from their servers and I get a lot of bounces. I stopped using it for critical email and rely on it only for bulk-type emails where missing that one email isn't the end of the world.
MailChimp for newsletters and SendGrid for everything else. That's a winning combo.
As a use of both SES, and MailChimp (as well as SendGrid for transactional) for https://Clara.io I find no difference between SES and MailChimp regarding delivery. It would be cool to see an objective study here. Otherwise it seems like FUD.
I don't use either, but I have to deal with spammers from both. The difference is that Mailchimp has a zero tolerance policy to abuse, whereas SES doesn't.
Amazon SES rocks from a pricing standpoint but deliverability isn't its strong suit.
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...
I didn't configure DKIM for SES. I configured it for SendGrid right out the gate but it was made more obvious that it was an important next step. I wasn't even aware that SES supported DKIM at the time of testing. It's an important factor that I admittedly overlooked.
Amazon's own emails regularly get caught in our mail's (Google Apps) spam filter, so I'm skeptical of SES's ability to match MailChimp's level of deliverability.
I find Mandrill, the backend service behind Mailchimp, a better option. They're much cheaper than SendGrid and even cheaper than SES in large quantities. And their deliverability is top notch.
Mandrill is not "the backend service behind MailChimp". Mandrill came after MailChimp and is a separate thing - they only allow it to be used for transactional email. Sending a newsletter via Mandrill violates its Terms of Service.
I just went through Mandrill's TOS [0] and didn't see anything referencing a ban on emailing lists.
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).
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.
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.
Ideas: since you are competing on the price. add a graph showing emails/payment growing with you and mail-chimp/other strong competition side by side. next to it say "lowers is,of course, better." then you have to attack the main objection(IMHO), lower delivery rate. not sure how but you need to think about the "no one ever got fired for chosing IBM" affect and counter it. you can say something reassuring about SES. or have a quote from a user or two.
This looks like a great value. We were considering using Campaign.js, but actually getting it up and running on a server to fire out campaigns seemed like a pain (as does using sendy). Combining the affordability of SES with some symbolance of the UX of mailchimp seems like a killer value proposition.
This looks great. The biggest pain we had with MailChimp was dealing with unsubscribes from our website (i.e. anything other than an unsubscribe link in the email). How does your API handle unsubscribes? Do you simply upload a complete list of users each time and those not in the file are removed?
Nice solution to save money, but for a company that is making money, $75 or $100 a month to MailChimp is well worth it. Beyond the time it will take you setup a server, configure it, and install Sendy, there is a huge limitation with SES:
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.
> Forewarning: remember how I asked you earlier if you were feeling bold?
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.
To buck the trend here, I was using Sendy, and switched (for now) to MailChimp.
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.
After writing this, I logged in, see there is a version 2 of Sendy, which appears to fix all these problems. Assuming I can get the unsubscribe to work, I'll switch back.
I've used Mailchimp and Sendy extensively. I send about 200k-300k emails a month. Here are the pros and cons:
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.
Sending directly from a Digital Ocean VPS? Yeah good luck with that bounce rate.
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.
> Sending directly from a Digital Ocean VPS? Yeah good luck with that bounce rate.
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).
Sendy is awesome and for non-technical people it is even easier and still has enormous cost savings to use a fully managed Sendy hosting provider. I use SendyHosting.com and it's worked great in my 2ish years of use with over 50k subscribers:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I used Mailchimp until I had 4,000 subscribers, and then I switched to my own service, but used their cheap Mandrill service for the actual email sending.
Has nobody here heard of tinyletter[0]. Its a side-service by MailChimp and offers newsletters for upto 5k subscribers for free. It has some basic analytics as well and has a really nice interface. If you just want a small announce mailing list, you might give it a try.
I also migrated away from mailchimp recently. Similar situation - I had a list with around 3000 subscribers, growing around 1,000 per month. In the end I went even cheaper than the author and chose PHPlist. Free and also works with Amazon SES. Working out the correct settings took some trial and error but it works like a charm now.
A well written post by Dave. But for a marketer, technology part is tricky, when it comes to installing Sendy the right way with Amazon SES server. I have been using EasySendy service for past few months and they are absolutely wonderful Sendy managed hosting service.
Yeah what the hell, I had to ctrl-f for it. I don't know why so many people are recommending SendGrid, MailGun is awesome, great UI, a breeze to integrate and it's pretty much free for a startup (first 10k mails free).
I just love those guys. They even check that you installed everything correctly for you.
When you see the word "campaign" associated with email, it means "marketing campaign", which means spam.
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.
It is a seemingly immutable law of HN that any discussion of email marketing must include at least one person complaining that all marketing emails are spam.
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.