A little story….

In the last two days I have moved my newsletter email list of 7000 people away from Aweber, a service similar to Mailchimp. They decided to match Mailchimp’s prices so my monthly bill jumped from $50/month to $130/month. That’s 160% increase, literally overnight!!

After a full rage quit, I briefly considered paying MailChimp, but its way too expensive, I don’t need any of the extra “features”, and the constant upselling is painful. So I decided to try and build something myself and eventually landed on Sendy, which I paid around $60 for, as a one-off licence payment.

After two days work, I now have a Sendy instance setup on my website subdomain and it sends the emails via AWS SES. I send about 3 email newsletters out per month, each one around 7000 emails. The first went out last night and the bill from AWS was $0.32. So my total monthly cost will be about $1, and I’m not paying for the number of ‘subscribers’. Compared to $130, that is a 99.23% saving!! Literally insane.

Proof of work and hosting your own shit wins again. It’s also a good example of where technology can be used for extortionate levels of value extraction, but also massive value gains if you do it yourself. I also pray for the day when self-hosting a cloud becomes much easier and more reliable so I’m not relying on Amazon (email) and Google (website, via an intermediary) to make this setup work.

#proofofwork #sendy #photography #value