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Show HN: https://www.markdownmail.io – Bulk newsletter sender using Amazon SES

18 points by antonydenyer ↗ HN
We recently launched a new project called https://www.markdownmail.io

The motivations behind https://www.markdownmail.io was that we wanted to be able to occasionally send out an email to our user base. Currently we have over 100k subscribers and on average send an email once every other month. With the mailchimp it was costing us $475 per month. That's a lot of money to send an occasional newsletter. So we started to look for alternatives. We decided to move to sendy.co which is self hosted and uses SES. Whilst the costs where lower we found the product unstable and difficult to use.

It was at this point we decided that we would write our own.

Currently https://www.markdownmail.io has the following features:

- List Management (csv import and a simple subscribe api)

- Compose emails in markdown - we just wanted simple text emails thatwill always look great on any device

- Send Newsletter - you can rate limit emails depending on your setup

That is it! We'd love your feedback

team@markdownmail.io

16 comments

[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 42.9 ms ] thread
buro9
A question I couldn't see answered on https://www.markdownmail.io/

Is this a GUI to my AWS SES account? Or is this your AWS SES account?

The reason I ask is spam. As in, if others use your service to send a lot of spam, am I (and my lists) going to be affected by the inevitable spam ranking?

Aside from that, this looks good.

Not sure whether your research looked at MailJet at all, but I regularly send 100k emails per month for £50 per month.

Edit: I'm an idiot, I re-read it carefully and see that is says "your AWS SES account". But I'll leave my dumb question here so others who miss it see the answer.

antonydenyer
You put your own SES account details in. So spam is essential your problem not ours.

No we didn't look at MailJet.

tejasm
markdownmail.io looks pretty easy to use and gets points for being a hosted service.

We use http://sendy.co/ - they have a one time fee per domain and needs to be installed on our server. The best part about sendy.co is the beautiful reports. You should check it out and try to integrate some/all of them in markdownmail.io to make it more effective.

All the best.

antonydenyer
Yeah we did pay for http://sendy.co and admittedly spent way too much time looking at those shiny graphs.

Part of the problem we had with sendy was just general stability with the amount we where sending. All of sudden you need to support a mysql and php db. It was just another thing to worry about. So we thought if we have to worry about it lets write it ourselves.

tejasm
Agreed - and hosted is where markdownmail.io has potential advantage.

But the graphs are easy to digest, and the generated CSVs (list of people opening the mail etc) are very helpful (at least to me).

antonydenyer
Fair enough, thanks for the feedback.

Any thoughts on pricing?

alecsmart1
I think $20 per mo is steep. Should be more like $5-$10.
alecsmart1
You can also think of adding a pay per use. Since you are talking to a price conscious audience (the non price conscious ones are already using MailChimp). Maybe $5 per use (unlimited mails).
antonydenyer
I think your right the initial entry is a bit steep. The thing that scared the crap out of us with mailchimp was that there was no end in sight for price increases. If they had a max of $500 then we may have stayed on mailchimp. I guess our thought process was if you start with us you'll never leave because our prices will top out. But yes I think we'll introduce $5 for the first 1000 to get you going something like that maybe?
antonydenyer
Pay per use is a difficult one, I think once you start complecting the pricing model like that people don't know where they stand. Personally I prefer simple.
tejasm
How about a free tier? Both MailChimp and MailJet have it, and the guy is going to pay for SES anyways.

Also, I'd reach out to AWS guys and ask them to provide $50 (or $20 - whatever they agree to) credit to every customer that signs up for your free tier since that'll lead the guys sitting on the fence to explore your product.

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abhinavg
Minor typo on the page: SES stands for Simple Email Service, not Simple Email Sender.
mr_road
Signed up: liking the UI, setup is not intuative that I need to sign up for SES or have a SMTP box knocking around. Will have a proper play later.

Liking the concept guys, keep up the good work.