HACKER Q&A
📣 systemvoltage

What service are you using to send marketing emails?


We're using AWS SES for transactional emails and it hasn't been a problem so far. But, for bulk sending of marketing emails, I've only found services that depend on number of contacts we have such as MailChimp. It is just prohibitively expensive because we send a marketing email for announcements of new products, usually once or twice a year. For this, it makes little sense to continue paying $600-$1000 / year for MailChimp.

Curious, is there a better "hacky" way to send emails? I don't need analytics and a whole bunch of templating features like on MailChimp. I can manage my own mailing list just fine in Postgres. I simply need an API and I've heard bad things about using AWS SES for bulk emails.

Looking for a low budget infrequent mass email service, I'd appreciate some insight.


  👤 pentacent_hq Accepted Answer ✓
I’ve actually had good experience using AWS SES for marketing emails. I’ve worked with clients who use it to send hundreds of thousands of emails, and SES is probably by far the best deal you can get price-wise. You just have to make sure that your email list is legit and you don’t get too many bounces or complaints.

By the way: Sending marketing emails is one of the official use-cases for SES: > You can configure Amazon SES quickly to support > several email use cases, including transactional, > marketing, or mass email communications. > -(https://aws.amazon.com/ses/)

Shameless plug: I’m building an Open Source email marketing tool that allows you to use SES (or plain SMTP, Sendgrid, Mailgun, …) to send mass emails. You can find the repo on GitHub: https://github.com/pentacent/keila There’s also a hosted version available … and if you’re interested, feel free to drop me a line :-)


👤 tryfinally
When I looked into low-budget mailing list management, I ended up spinning up a ListMonk instance. (It's free/open source.) But you still end up needing to connect it to a mailing backend like AWS SES or similar. If you want to avoid SES, I'm not sure what better alternatives there are, but I'd like to know too! (I have extremely low mailing volume and would like to prioritize deliverability)

https://listmonk.app/


👤 jwithington
http://sendy.co

Yours is the exact use case that it covers super well.

Pay a one-time ~$60 fee and runs on top of SES.


👤 nerdyadventurer
https://www.sendinblue.com/

* European service

* Cheaper than MailChimp (https://www.sendinblue.com/mailchimp/)


👤 cloudking
We recently switched to Klaviyo https://www.klaviyo.com

The UX is simple and integrations seem much easier to use than MailChimp, it's also a bit cheaper.


👤 greensky23
Surprised to see no one has mentioned https://sendfox.com/. They mention having 100,000+ users, and requires a one-time fee for sending.

Misses some of the bells-and-whistles, but good enough for me and a few friends I know.


👤 strzibny
I used Mailgun before and at work we have Postmark. Both good.

I also made the following table for myself some time ago: https://nts.strzibny.name/transactional-email-providers/


👤 feistypharit
I’ve had a good experience with email octopus. Converted a client from spreadsheets and big Bcc lists with little problem. I’m not sure how big or how many lists you have.

Https://emailoctopus.com


👤 ss48
You can a marketing email plugin for Wordpress called FluentCRM and still send with Amazon SES with FluentSMTP https://fluentsmtp.com/. Annual subscription, but not as expensive as MailChimp.

https://fluentcrm.com/

Also check out MailGun: https://www.mailgun.com/ . It might be more in line with what you were looking for.


👤 hulitu
How to send spam on HN. /s In the end the thread is useful to build a list of domains to filter.

👤 propter_hoc
ActiveCampaign, which we also use as a sales crm. So conversions automatically go into the sales funnel.

👤 Rias

👤 altdataseller
Is there any reason you cant use SES for marketing emails? Or comparable services like Postmark?

👤 cmer
One unique approach for lower volume is Gmass. It’s really good at what it does.

👤 netman21
I use loops.so a YC funded startup. It is a monthly charge though. But super simple to use for product updates. The "loops" part I have not used yet which is emails triggered by actions.

Kind of strange that you only send a couple of marketing emails a year. What's up with that?


👤 butekla
Omnisend, the best support there is.

👤 umen
great post , can someone tell me what for example mailchimp or any other big players in the market are using for there SMTP ?

also is there any good internet group that talking about this staff ?

SMTP , emails teach and such ? Thanks


👤 julienreszka
substack