HN Explorer

Ask HN: How do you run your website's newsletter?

3 points by jarbus ↗ HN
I have a personal website that I build with Hugo, and currently the only way to subscribe to new posts is with an RSS feed. I want to add an option to subscribe to a newsletter via email for people who don't use RSS, but I can't find a good way to do so for a low cost since tinyletter.com was killed. What does HN use to host a mailing list? I don't need advanced features like analytics, just a way to subscribe to an RSS feed via email.

9 comments

[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 31.1 ms ] thread
cranberryturkey
store the email in a db and send out an email once a week
jarbus
This doesn't give people the option to unsubscribe though, right?
cranberryturkey
you create a unique id and include that in unsubscribe link in email and set user.subscribed = false
jarbus
not a bad idea also, might have to give it a try if none of the other services work for me.
roosgit
I used to use MailChimp. The current free plan seems to be limited to 500 subscribers and 1000 monthly email sends. So if you have less than 250 subscribers you can send a weekly email to all of them, for free.

I noticed they also offer an RSS to Email option, but I couldn’t find if it’s available on the Free plan. https://mailchimp.com/features/rss-to-email/

jarbus
I saw this option as well, but I worry that I might get bots or people who don't open the message to subscribe. So if only 10-20% of readers actually open a given email, then at best 25-50 people can benefit from the free tier, max. I'm looking for something a bit more scalable. The next lowest tier of mailchimp costs $13/mo, which is more than 12x what I pay for all my other hosting + domain name costs combined.
roosgit
I was under the impression that you have to confirm your email address when you subscribe, but I could be wrong. There’s also an option, as sender, to unsubscribe folks who haven’t open your newsletter in a while.

Another route would be AWS SES. They have a free tier. For managing the subscribe/unsubscribe process you could still use MailChimp or a self-hosted solution like Keila https://www.keila.io/, although I have no experience with this.

jarbus
I didn't realize that there was that option, I might have to give them a try then! Keila also looks good, but I can't find anything about RSS integration with them. Thanks!
pentacent_hq
Creator of Keila here.

We have a Zapier integration which allows you to automatically create campaigns from an RSS feed. It's currently in private beta, let me know if you want to give it a try!