I've build a bunch of smaller projects trying to give people alternatives to social media (e.g. https://potato.horse) and noticed that a lot of people actually decided to subscribe to the content through email. The problem is that I didn't expect any significant traffic, so ended up sending emails personally (I'm THAT lean).
Although this is great from marketing perspective (people like speaking with real people, who would've guessed), this scales very poorly.
I've used Mailchim/Mailgun in the past, but I was wondering if anything changed in the past few years in that domain.
Here's what's important to me (in order of priority):
- a good API client, well documented API (I want to spend max 1 day of setting it up and plugging into 2-3 projects)
- custom domain support
- no privacy-dubious practices (ideally, I'd just call the API with a list of messages and store the contact list on my side)
- good record with spam blockers (I'm aware that this depends mainly on my domain)
- ideally less than 10$ per month for ca 3000 emails (I don't think I'll exceed that too quickly)
What I _don't_ care about:
- any marketing related features, I just want to automate email delivery
Most of my sites are on Vercel or Cloudfront, but I'd rather avoid spending too much time with AWS and go for something really simple. I don't want to spend too much time on infra.
I'm happy with any "mainstream" language, but I'd rather use node + Typescript since I use it on a daily basis at the moment.
Got any tips? Should I use a SaaS platform for that? Or should I just set up a DO Droplet with a service and use that instead?
For 3000 mails a month, you'll spend $ 0.30.
Disclaimer: I work at AWS.
- I use a combination of sendgrid, mandrill (mailchimp) and sparkpost. All 3 are decent. Sendgrid is easiest to start with since it doesn't require domain validation but I prefer Mandrill since it shows much better logs including the actual body of the email. Problem with mandrill is that it got acquired by mailchimp and now requires a mailchimp subscription. Next is Sparkpost which I highly recommend. Sendgrid works but can have delivery issues especially if not using dedicated IP. AWS SES is not bad to be honest but considering it is AWS, there may be a bit of learning curve compared to say Sendgrid.
Key points:
- Absolutely free
- Add your domains
- Set DMARC, DKIM & SPF
- Almost unlimited storage for emails
- Adding multiple users (email accounts) free
- Additional features included like Drive, Docs etc.
Note: We use it for FreeTools.Dev (https://freetools.dev) and it works very well (such as SMTP delivery)
Another very well done service but maybe a little expensive is Postmark. I really like their simple and clean interface, their working code samples, and their focus on good delivery. I am a happy customer and I recommend them.