An amusing easy to miss thing here is maintenance cost. I ran my own DNS, mail, and website and it was set and forget for ten years (an hour every so often for Debian upgrades and dist-upgrades that went cleanly) Then my provider decided they wanted to get rid of the hardware I was using.
At some point over those ten years, my time became more valuable than the hosted dollar cost. And because the maintenance was delayed to later, I paid for it just when time was most valuable. I didn’t even manage to migrate everything. I’m going to have to go back and get everything out of backups.
Just a story that was funny to me. I’d probably do the same thing as this dude.
Same here. I made a point of documenting all the stuff I had to do when I moved from one provider to another, to ensure I can do it again in the future…
I had similar setup. I run https://betterdev.link and original use Mailchimp to scale to 2k. It’s free and great with lot of features and I would say if you had money, then Mailchimp is great.
OT: Firefox somehow displays a security warning when I try to open https://betterdev.link . Not sure if it’s just me, but just thought I’d let you know.
Ok, I didn’t know MailChimp provided such an API.
I guess you still need to include the unsubscribe link into your emails before sending. How do you get that information for each of the email address you get by calling that endpoint? Does the returned CSV include that (or anything that allows to guess it)?
Downside: when user visit that unsubscribe form, they have to type in their email address in order to ubsubscribe. It doesn’t support one click unsubscribe. I think if you use their Template Render API you will be able to generate unique one-click unsubscribe link per user.
I’m in the process of moving to EmailOctopus which also hooks into your SES, except that it’s completely hosted. Mailchimp pricing (particularly for small business) is quite ridiculous.
An amusing easy to miss thing here is maintenance cost. I ran my own DNS, mail, and website and it was set and forget for ten years (an hour every so often for Debian upgrades and dist-upgrades that went cleanly) Then my provider decided they wanted to get rid of the hardware I was using.
At some point over those ten years, my time became more valuable than the hosted dollar cost. And because the maintenance was delayed to later, I paid for it just when time was most valuable. I didn’t even manage to migrate everything. I’m going to have to go back and get everything out of backups.
Just a story that was funny to me. I’d probably do the same thing as this dude.
Same here. I made a point of documenting all the stuff I had to do when I moved from one provider to another, to ensure I can do it again in the future…
Sounds good, but, alas, it doesn’t look like Sendy is [fully] open source.
I had similar setup. I run https://betterdev.link and original use Mailchimp to scale to 2k. It’s free and great with lot of features and I would say if you had money, then Mailchimp is great.
But due to cost, I switch to AWS SES(https://github.com/yeo/betterdev.link/blob/master/baja/fanout.go) and it’s way cheaper.
However, what I do is quite unique and interesting which I think I should share.
I let Mailchimp handles subscription form and unsubscribe link. This free me to not deal with spam and GDPR. Since Mailchimp handle those.
When I need to send out news letter, I export Mailchimp contact to a CSV file.
OT: Firefox somehow displays a security warning when I try to open https://betterdev.link . Not sure if it’s just me, but just thought I’d let you know.
Not only you. The certificate seems to have expired somewhen today: “Expires on: July 4, 2019”.
Oh thank you. The auto renew broken due to some refactor recently :(. Just fixed it.
Do you export a CSV file by hand or programmatically?
I do it programmatically. They have an API here: https://developer.mailchimp.com/documentation/mailchimp/guides/how-to-use-the-export-api/
APIKey can be generated from here: https://us16.admin.mailchimp.com/account/api/
Now you just do this
You will get the subscribe in a format similar to CSV.
Ok, I didn’t know MailChimp provided such an API.
I guess you still need to include the unsubscribe link into your emails before sending. How do you get that information for each of the email address you get by calling that endpoint? Does the returned CSV include that (or anything that allows to guess it)?
They have a unsubscribe link. When you go into Form Design, then select Unsubscribe form you can get that URL. It looks like this:
https://link.us16.list-manage.com/unsubscribe?u=[id]&id=[listid]
Downside: when user visit that unsubscribe form, they have to type in their email address in order to ubsubscribe. It doesn’t support one click unsubscribe. I think if you use their Template Render API you will be able to generate unique one-click unsubscribe link per user.
and btw, hit me up on vinh@getopty.com I can share more information about it.
Maybe it’s just me but is it really 100x?
So, say he reaches his goal of 10,000 subscribers, he will be spending $4 for Sendy and $5 for the hosting (plus invisible maintenance costs).
So, instead of all off-hand at $75/mo, he is going to pay $9 + maintenance /mo. So, he’s spending about 8 times less. Is that 100x? 🤔
I’m in the process of moving to EmailOctopus which also hooks into your SES, except that it’s completely hosted. Mailchimp pricing (particularly for small business) is quite ridiculous.