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Show HN: Dittofeed – 1-Click deploy, self-host Mailchimp alternative (github.com)

100 points by maxthegeek1 ↗ HN
Hi HN, we've released Dittofeed v0.4.0, a significant update primarily focused on facilitating self-hosting. Dittofeed is an open source (MIT licensed) alternative to platforms like customer.io, mailchimp, klaviyo, iterable etc.

Self-hosting is particularly useful if you:

- Want to evaluate Dittofeed without a long-term commitment

- Prefer fixed, non-volume based pricing models

- Aim to keep all personally identifiable information within your own infrastructure

In this version, we introduced 'Dittofeed Lite,' which merges the dashboard, API, and worker services, simplifying deployment, along with providing an easy auth setup.

We've also configured a 1-Click Render deployment. The Render setup comes at a fixed cost of $39/month. However, by using alternative hosting solutions for the Postgres and ClickHouse instances (neon, clickhouse cloud), the monthly costs can be reduced to under $20.

We personally feel that there’s a big problem with how existing platforms handle pricing, charging insanely high prices with low contact limits, while restricting access to really basic table stakes features.

Excited to share this work, and hear your thoughts and feedback!

Github Repo - https://github.com/dittofeed/dittofeed

Demo - https://demo.dittofeed.com/dashboard/journeys

Docs - https://docs.dittofeed.com/getting-started

29 comments

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capableweb
The absolute worst with hosting your own email lists / transactional emails is that you need to be very up to date on the status of your IPs and domains in various blocklists, and it's very easy to get blocked from them.

I don't see anything mentioned about this, nor other similar issues, either on the website or in the GitHub repository.

Are you offering some functionality that help people manage this, or how do you suggest people approach this "when not if" problem?

slig
Looks like they currently support sending emails through SendGrid https://docs.dittofeed.com/integrations/channels/sendgrid
rexreed
Sendgrid's deliverability and reliability is starting to tank. Looking to get off Sendgrid myself.
maxthegeek1
What alternatives are you looking at?
concordance
Support for Resend (https://resend.com/) would be appreciated!
zenorocha
Resend founder here. Nice to see a self-hosted alternative for Mailchimp in the world. Would love to see support for Resend on Dittofeed :)
maxthegeek1
Hey, love what you guys have done with React Email <3
rexreed
Since the application for Dittofeed is similar to Mailchimp, which would be newsletters mostly and not transactional email, is that compatible with your primary business case at Resend? From what I can tell, Resend is mostly focused on transactional email and not on mass email messages such as newsletters, which is what I see as what Dittofeed is sharing with their Mailchimp alternative. If you're open to newsletters, let me know, and I'll give it a switch from Sendgrid!
zenorocha
We're definitely open to newsletters :)
nathancahill
It's been slowly tanking for a decade at least.
turnsout
I used Sendgrid as part of a RocketChat install in 2021, and the deliverability was atrocious. I vowed to never use it again, but haven’t explored alternatives recently. What options are you looking at?
maxthegeek1
Hello! We're not an email service provider ourselves (where one would normally configure email domain/ip settings), but we allow users integrate their own ESP accounts. We currently support sendgrid, and in the near term future we plan to support AWS SES.
capableweb
I see! I understand you're not a email service provider, but "self-hosted" gave me the impression you actually handle sending the emails (via SMTP or whatever) as well as the management around the lists, not just outsourcing the email sending part to a hosted 3rd party. Seems I was mistaken :)
maxthegeek1
We plan to support plain SMTP as well, so that users can be self hosted end to end if they want.
mikeshi42
This is super awesome to see open source - I wonder if there's some value in email flows for self-hosted software as well.

I'm thinking if someone self-hosts a complex OSS app like Dittofeed (or even HyperDX ;) ) - would it be beneficial to allow admins to enable email onboarding flows like they get in the SaaS side of things, so end-users can be drip-fed product docs appropriately (and even customize it themselves if they're a big enough enterprise)? This can probably help onboarding/adoption internally if done well.

Either way - I'm really excited to try this out on our cloud side of things to help our new users learn our platform faster :)

maxthegeek1
Hey, great idea! We should probably make our internal onboarding journeys public like you’re suggesting so that self hosting users can benefit from them :)
etse
Git-versioned marketing templates seem unfriendly to presumably a marketing user.

That said, I’ve been integrating and supporting similar platforms over the past several years, and the feature set and maturity is low for the cost of these services. If Dittofeed puts the pressure on the market, that’s fantastic.

edoceo
Nice, I built an internal tool like this once. Love what you've got here. IME the next priority is supporting alternate providers to SG (and I see from the thread it's on your roadmap).

Another option for the SMTP part is using an upstream mail provider perhaps https://mxroute.com/ works for folks.

Oddly, I've had pretty good success with sending from my own Postfix+OpenDKIM based infrastructure for many years (in Linode). I suppose it's mostly because my volume from that box and those domains is so low and is primarily transactional rather than news-letter like things (I send service announcements maybe quarterly). I mentioned it elsewhere in thread but I like Postmark for those newsletter & drip-campaign stuff.