Is it me or is the proliferation of email list management services actually making it harder to decide who to use?

And the prices are all over the map, and seem more than a little outrageous to me.  I guess if you email your list like crazy, selling hard in every message then maybe it’s worth paying so much.  But to me, a couple hundred bucks a month if you have a list of 50k addresses, seems pretty harsh.

Since I’m finally getting back into my IM software development business, I needed to get an email service again and import my old lists (I had saved them to CSVs before I shut down my old mail services).  I chose Mailchimp because I thought that I would have unrestricted capabilities with a list of under 2,000 names.

WRONG.  Turns out you are limited in daily email volume as well as total monthly volume.  And limited pretty severely too.  When I started doing the math to get serious about building my lists again on their platform, I didn’t like what I saw.

But then I remembered something that had been suggested to me a while back, but that I thought sounded like too much trouble.  Some sort of self-hosted thing that ran on AWS (Amazon Web Services) called Sendy.

I read up on it and within a few minutes realized what it actually was, and bought it.  For about $60, you get a PHP/MySQL script that installs on your own server.

This is the part that scared me… sending emails from my own server?  Oh hellz to the NO WAY.

But that’s not what Sendy does.  Not at all.  Turns out, it just acts as a middle-layer to Amazon’s own transactional email service called SES.

Basically it’s what Amazon uses to send emails, and now you can use it too.  So you get the benefit of their infrastructure, IPs, deliverability, etc. but for an absurdly low cost.

How low?  Try $0.0001 per email address!

That’s crazy cheap.

Oh and did I mention, no specific restrictions with regards to affiliate marketing?

Also since it’s a transactional service with its own API, it’s built to be able to send individual emails from your own systems.  This means if you’re a software developer like me, you can send things like license emails and other one-time things without sending from your own server, which generally results in tons of your messages going to junk/spam folders.

So far, Sendy seems like a near dream come true.  $60, once, and $0.10 per thousand emails sent??  Simply awesome.  If you’re tired of paying $30 or much much more per month to have an email list, you really gotta check out Sendy.

Amazon… you rock.  Seriously.

JVC