Ask HN: What are some tools small startups use for subscription management?

4 points by chheplo 5 years ago | 4 comments

Mailchimp is an expensive tool for a startup not producing revenue yet. We are building a SaaS platform and we would love something that get integrated with it. If not, is it a better idea to just develop a small module that perform the maillist, newsletters and subscription management tasks?

preommr 5 years ago |

Yea, I don't know why mailchimp is so expensive.

Sendgrid is pretty good. I like it's UI and from what I've seen it has feature parity for things like marketing campaigns.

I think it just comes down to using a combination of strategies depending on the need.

Postfix - internal mailing

Amazon SES - One off emails for things like apis where trust/reputation still matter

sendgrid/moosend/etc - marketing campaigns and they also do transactional emails too, I guess. This should be around 15-30 bucks.

chheplo 5 years ago | |

Thank you. One thing I was looking into was integrating my user DB with subscribe/preferences/unsubscribe link that is being sent with each email. Mailchimp does it very well. I am not sure I can integrate my Django user model with sendgrid, but I will sure check it out.

ecesena 5 years ago |

Check out sendy: https://sendy.co/

stephenr 5 years ago | |

I would strongly suggest OP and anyone else looking for something, find something other than Sendy.

Dumpster tire fire in the middle of a train wreck is the nicest way I can describe Sendy.

The code in it is like a teacher deliberately set out to exemplify all the worst traits of software development, to have students identify & fix the problem areas, but they went too far and anyone with a bit of experience would just say “scrap it and start over”.