Quote:
Originally Posted by Gullanian
We've recently just switched from smartermail to google email for our business email (smartermail kept wiping all our emails lol) but the limitations on gmail for sending email are fairly tight for a mid sized website, around 2,000 a day I think. We're approaching 2k subscribers on some mailing lists (have 3 in total) so this isn't really any good.
Was looking at mailchimp and it seems great, but as soon as you have to pay for it it seems very expensive! $50 p/m for 2.5k-5k subscribers, I don't know if we could justify $600 a year just to send out emails.
Is there any cheaper alternatives anyone can recommend?
Grunching in case someone has already answered with these, but I looked into this a few months ago and:
Amazon Web Services offer probably the cheapest alternative, their SES service, but, at least as of 2 months ago, their quota system was braindead and a deal-killer for me. When you first sign up, they let you send 1000 emails per day, and then they dynamically raise your limit as your volume increases. This is bad for someone like me who is launching a social networking site that I would love to go viral at some point, because if I get more than 1000 signups on the first day, a bunch will never get confirmation emails from me.
Amazon says the quotas will scale up based on your usage quickly, but I don't buy it, the scaling examples they give would have *definitely* results in lots of people not receiving email when my biggest previous site was having bursts of publicity here and there.
I also worry that AWS SES is in very early stages and hasn't been proven yet. It'd suck to implement it fully and then find out a bunch of people are spamming from it because it's cheap, and that getting their sending IPs on blacklists or whatever. Having email deliverability problems is so brutal because usually by the time you find out, a TON of damage has already been done.
A friend of mine with a moderately busy website (top 10,000 on Alexa anyway) recommended
www.postmarkapp.com to me, and I am going to use them for my site, they seem okay so far, but my site hasn't launched publicly, so I don't have any real-world data to work from. I researched this quite a lot though and didn't find anyone saying anything BAD about them anyway. Also now I think of it, same friend recommended this small-looking DNS company who I went "ugh that looks shoddy" and sure enough they had some significant downtime recently, so I guess I can't assume he's done a TON of research into Postmark.
I also looked into
www.sendgrid.com, seemed solid enough, can't recall why I didn't choose them, maybe price, dunno.
So yeah, for my purposes I am using Postmark, and after launch I want to integrate Amazon SES for less important emails ("John favourited your tweet" type stuff if it was a Twitter-like site), since SES is very cheap. I mean, Postmark is pretty damn cheap too though, $1.50/1000 sends, but I also like the idea of having everything set up to switch between services easily, should one go down unexpectedly one day or something.