Create your own MailChimp clone for $5 a month with Sendy

We&#x27;ve got about 12,000 people on our announce list. I switched us over to Sendy three months ago.<p>It doesn&#x27;t have the slick, &quot;just works&quot; appeal of MailChimp, but it also doesn&#x27;t carry the big monthly price tag.<p>We&#x27;ve had the same open and clickthrough rates with Sendy as before, and I haven&#x27;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.<p>If price were no object, we&#x27;d go back to MailChimp in a heartbeat. But they were charging us $125&#x2F;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.

The Sendy codebase is horrifying. It&#x27;s not good. Buyer beware.<p>EDIT I realized I made a blanket claim and didn&#x27;t provide any details. So I&#x27;ll try to explain.<p>No framework, little shared code between files. Warnings and deprecations ignored, poor variable names, db queries mixed right in with html output, user id&#x27;s imploded from array and stored into a single database field, etc.<p>Just lots and lots of rough PHP.

This is ridiculous. You don&#x27;t only pay MailChimp for the software, you pay for their deliverability.

<i>shameless plug</i><p>I built SimplerSES for the same reason - a cheaper alternative to MailChimp using AWS SES. It&#x27;s built as a hosted service so theres no server costs, and you only pay for the emails you send out.

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:<p>10,000&#x2F;24hrs at a rate of 5 emails per second.<p>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.

<i>another shameless plug</i><p>If you&#x27;re looking for a hosted alternative to Sendy, please take a look at a project I&#x27;ve been working on for the last year or so: <a href="https://emailoctopus.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;emailoctopus.com</a><p>We&#x27;re not currently charging anything (still working out a pricing model!) so you only have to pay your SES fees. And as it&#x27;s hosted on EC2 instances, you&#x27;ll still get your first 62,000 emails a month under Amazon&#x27;s free tier.

&gt; Forewarning: remember how I asked you earlier if you were feeling bold?<p>This is going to be the part that scares most people away. But you are ready. You can do this. We&#x27;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.<p>I really like how you are coaching the reader through the &#x27;instruction manual&#x27; stuff.

Checkout Converkit by Nathan Barry (he&#x27;s in HN quite frequently).<p><a href="http://convertkit.com" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;convertkit.com</a><p>Great alternative (sort of like aweber with good design &amp; active development + a focus on building autoresponders).

This can be $0&#x2F;month if you host your Sendy install on Heroku instead of DigitalOcean (as I do).<p>Worth noting that with Amazon SES, if you want to send more than 10,000 emails in a day, you&#x27;ll need to apply (to Amazon) for approval.

To buck the trend here, I was using Sendy, and switched (for now) to MailChimp.<p>I would stick with Sendy, but I could never get the unsubscribe links to work, and it doesn&#x27;t automatically insert any footers, like a spam compliance. Also, there was no way to edit someone&#x27;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&#x27;t do it through the API either. Their support is great for what seems like a one-man show.<p>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&#x27;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&#x27;t eligible for the upgrade price.

I&#x27;ve used Mailchimp and Sendy extensively. I send about 200k-300k emails a month. Here are the pros and cons:<p><i></i>Mailchimp<i></i>: if price isn&#x27;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&#x27;re sending a lot of emails and want them to &quot;just get delivered without any hassle&quot;, use this.<p><i></i>Sendy<i></i>: it&#x27;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&#x27;s a breeze to use. I haven&#x27;t noticed any deliverability issues, but supposedly it&#x27;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.<p>I use SendGrid free on Azure because Azure VPS too have an extremely high bounce rate. Setting up an SMTP server isn&#x27;t exactly hard or expensive (regardless of if you&#x27;re integrating mailing lists or not), it is the good rep&#x27; IP address and making it &quot;someone else&#x27;s problem&quot; to deal with a lot of email related problems (poor reputation, blacklists, random host decides to block you, etc) that you&#x27;re paying for.<p>Sendgrid, Mailchimp, and so on primarily exist so you can just hit send and then that&#x27;s as deep as your involvement goes as far as emails.

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&#x27;s worked great in my 2ish years of use with over 50k subscribers:<p>My referral link: <a href="http://www.sendyhosting.com/?utm_source=tagsforlikes&amp;utm_medium=website&amp;utm_campaign=referral" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.sendyhosting.com&#x2F;?utm_source=tagsforlikes&amp;utm_med...</a><p>link: <a href="http://www.sendyhosting.com" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.sendyhosting.com</a>

I switched away from MailChimp to Sendy and it is way cheaper. MailChimp is stupidly expensive, annoyingly so, and it doesn&#x27;t add much value over Sendy.

Sorry but if you are taking all the trouble to install Sendy you should look at Mandrill [1].<p>I use their python api, hooked a Django project with Html editor (ckeditor) and bang.<p>Magic Formula = Django + Mandrill app + django-ckeditor<p>Sending more than 1 000 000 mails by month (reaching 1.7M now).<p>It is fast, it works. The main problem: to reach the support you should use twitter and talk to the monkey.<p>[1] - <a href="https://www.mandrill.com/" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.mandrill.com&#x2F;</a>

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.<p>[0]: <a href="http://tinyletter.com/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;tinyletter.com&#x2F;</a>

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.

<i>shameless plug</i><p>Or you could just use the free Sendgrid plan for up to 12k emails a month :)

Hehe, the post is full of referral links to Sendy.

We have also switched to sendy months ago and I love it. No problems with spam reports yet.

I don&#x27;t pay MailChimp for the dashboard, I pay them to guarantee my mail is delivered. DIY mail delivery is a nightmare.

mailkimp

This article is a spam from a spammer for a spamming tool, aimed at other spammers.