Speaking as a direct competitor of Mailchimp (CEO of EmailOctopus.com), I strongly disagree. It's an enormous market and there are plenty of ways to differentiate yourself.

Effectively, that's exactly what I'm doing with AWS.

Some of us actively dislike what Mailchimp has become and welcome the alternatives.

Same here.

You can definitely compete with the likes of Mailchimp. It's a big market.

Reliable mail deliverability is no small problem, however, and one that by and large has already been solved by other providers.

If a new competitor enters this market that competitor will have to solve this problem again without being able to provide an additional benefit to customers.

So, building your own email delivery infrastructure - even if by merely using existing cloud-based infrastructure such as AWS SES - might prove to be an uphill battle.

It might still be worth it though in order to remain independent of third parties.

Founder of Sentopia.net here... I actually agree, we would love to integrate a better campaign editor in our platforms, since we have our own delivery engine and don't rely on Amazon SES.

> you have to compete equally with Mailchimp

Why would they need to compete equally with Mailchimp?

MailChimp is crazy expensive for mailing lists of size.

If this is a problem you're having, I recommend checking out a service that integrates with Amazon SES. This is what we do (EmailOctopus.com) but there are plenty others out there. You'll generally save up to 5x on Mailchimp prices.

I've been using EmailOctopus for more than two years and would highly recommend it! (This is unsolicited, by the way.)

So glad to hear this!