I had the same reaction too.

Why would I go though all this for 500 euro a year.

Why doesn't OP deploy this as a service for 15$ a month ?

Dealing with the spammers and deliverability issues alone is enough to deter me, for one, from the business.

How many of these €50/month does it take to reconsider? €50 for hosting, €50 for email, €50 for tracing, €50 for sentiment analysis, €50 for this, €50 for that. By the time you realise, you are burning €6k a year on stuff that takes hours to roll out yourself.

You are suggesting rolling out all of those things yourself will take only a one-time investment of "hours" (meaning fewer than 10?), with no ongoing maintenance?

I think at minimum "hours" per month seems more realistic, no?

Maintenance isn't too bad IMO.

I've been running Sendy for a while on my own host. I spend about 30 minutes a year on maintenance time to occasionally upgrade versions. Each upgrade takes about 10 minutes and I tend do it every few months.

This line of reasoning is how to tell the difference between a manager and an engineer :)

An engineer should recognize what is worth their time. If setting this up takes more than 5hour a year of time to setup and maintain then it’s not worth it. You’ll be wasting money

Depends who is paying. If it’s your own project then 5 hours of your own time might not be worth that much. If someone else is paying you then both options cost money and the equation changes.

Not eveyone earns 100€ an hour, especially in Europe. The newsletter has a French name ("Le courrier du Hacker"), and in France 45/50k€ a year is a good salary. That's around 14/15€ an hour. Which means ~33 hours a year of maintenance.

There are many ways to measure the cost of something like this, but a blind look at average salaries is probably the worst. It doesn't factor in overhead or opportunity cost. In most companies, having a developer spend a week on maintenance of a system which isn't a core business value doesn't make sense. They would be much better utilized on value added work. I guarantee you most engineers could delivery way more than $500 in savings in a week.

As I said here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27259123 this isn't a company, it's a newsletter so more of something like a side project. I don't think you could deliver more than 500€ of savings in a week because the email costs were the main costs. I agree with you than within a company this would be different, but this isn't a company.

My comment was targeted to the person I replied to, which I interpreted as "managers only think in terms of time saved where as developers if merely left alone would roll it their own and save time and money", which is ridiculous. An engineer should think like their manager, and the manager should think like the engineer. A cost/benefit should be realized, and I think for the high majority of companies, you should not be rolling your own to save 500/year.

A newsletter is so different because merely this blogpost could have generated enough money/attention to warrant doing it, but there's an endless amount of reasoning that can be done to warrant both choices.

The cost to the company per engineer hour is significantly higher than the engineer’s hourly rate.

But this isn't a company, it's a newletter the author is running. It's important to consider the context of things. Here the only cost is opportunity cost, which I wouldn't know how to evaluate. On the other hand, they save 500€ a year, learned new skills and created content for their blog.

I think it is actually closer to ~16 hours a year assuming the lower end of the range you suggested, and dramatically less if this person makes more than that.

Most simply, I think the typical calculation is if there were 40 working hours per week (8 hours, Mon - Fri) then there are 2080 working hours per year, which is ~21.63 Euro (per hour, assuming 45k EUR) just in salary - other commenters pointed out an employer would have other costs, but lets try and keep it simple as was suggested.

But beyond simple, you don't work on public holidays and Europe tends to have 20-25 vacation days per year as well. That probably adds up to 35 days (280 hours) in France. Therefore the number of hours actually 'at work' is only going to be 1800 a year, so 45k EUR comes to 25EUR per hour.

I imagine this might work on AWS Free Tier but while SES supports ~62k emails per month as 'Always Free', any EC2 instance or network bandwidth is probably billable here. There's probably up to 100EUR a year in cost associated here?

So you have 400EUR of money Mailchimp charged for the service and will never be "apples to apples" because now you're responsible for initial setup and ongoing maintenance. Definitely seems simple in the blog post, but unmentioned was how you backup all the configuration and state, how do you monitor it, most of the features of Mailtrain (e.g. Click Stats) rely on the NodeJS application being operational so is this actually a load balancer, two instances, and the extra complexity of database replication, et al? It is also now on you to make sure it stays patched, isn't compromised, etc.

I imagine there are different deliverability promises with Mailchimp vs. Amazon SES and you might now have to do more managing of that through AWS interfaces?

All of the above needs to fit into ~16 hours a year if we're going to draw this comparison against what you'd make as a salaried engineer. All of the above is time that could have been spent on extra content for the newsletter, or improved content for it, other than this post obviously, or on audience building, on other professional development, or just about anything else.

I think the ROI of writing the article and making everyone debate this on the internet was pretty high, but the title feels like clickbait. This is a straight trade for saving a little money vs. a semi-significant personal time investment.

Here are my calculations: a salary of 45k euros in France means you take home 2618€ a month (according to https://www.salaire-brut-en-net.fr/). A month is ~4.33 weeks, a week is 35 hours. 2618 / (35 * 4.33) gives me ~17.40, so I made a mistake with my initial calculation. Still, it's way less than your 25 euros per hour. Maybe you underestimate the difference between "brut" and "net" and then taxes, which are both pretty high in France.

500€ at 17.40€ an hour is 28.7 hours, 22.9 if we're taking your 400€ (I'll believe you on that, I don't know much about AWS pricing). I think that may be reasonable to take care of it. There's also a big problem: you can't directly transform hours of your life into money. If the author is not paid by the hour because he's a cadre, he had to work 218 days in the year, and that's it, working more hours won't make him directly earn more (more info here https://www.service-public.fr/particuliers/vosdroits/F19261?...). Finding freelance work to expand those 10 to 30 hours (to be very large) isn't going to be easy too. As an aside, if we take 218 days for our calculations, that comes up to ~20€ an hour if they work 8 hours days, and ~23€ an hour if they work 7 hours days.

I do agree that database replication seems like a big issue, and if that's the case maybe switching to RDS could be a good idea.

Anyway, I think the article is relatively good at demonstrating the two extremes, Mailchimp vs everything by hand. Everyone is free to take of that what they find interesting, even if it's "I'd rather pay for Mailchimp".

> I think the ROI of writing the article and making everyone debate this on the internet was pretty high, but the title feels like clickbait. This is a straight trade for saving a little money vs. a semi-significant personal time investment.

I do think that it should be "How I" instead of "How to", but on the other hand "save up x/year" already informs you that the author is trading their time for money. I don't think it's clickbait just because it wouldn't apply to your or other peoples situations. Especially if 500€ is a little money for you, you're not really the target of the article.

Exactly, engineers should be lazy (seriously).

Yes and no. There is some value in the experience gained. That being said, there might be better experiences to be gained (i.e., stick with Mailchimp and learn some other tool).

Regardless, it's not simply about time.

And then, it is not even your own solution, but AWS SES.

I have been running mail servers for 20+ years, sending volumes that would have made me multiple times bancrupt if I was doing it via Mailchimp or SES.

AWS SES is ~1$/10,000 emails. Are you the biggest spammer or just very very poor?

Also, 20 years ago running your email server was way easier than now

At a previous job, all API errors were emailed to internal email lists.

The dev monitoring the API health kept track of system health by looking at the number of unread messages in his inbox. If the number of unread messages went up by < 100,000 in a day, the API was doing fine. If there were a couple million new messages, it means we were having problems.

So... I can definitely see how this is plausible, if not uh, "best practice".

This pains me physically to read, haha.

We used this Django feature as a poor man's Sentry years back.

Not to mention the free tier.

You could email everyone on Earth for less than the salary of an engineer with SES.

Except mailchimp has dumbed it’s interface down so much that maintaining it takes far more time than installing a package like this or paying a small fee for a similar SES backed service like Mail Octopus.

Assuming that the newsletter application is a fairly stable release and it's on a package manager or auto updates via docker. The management of that is probably pretty low.

Absolutely. We have lots of small business clients on a tight budget and this sounds like a bad deal even in that case.

We pay mailchimp closer to 2,462.74 EUR per year. At this point it is totally worth it.

We also pay around 200USD/mo and are a small local business with some online presence for e-tutorials etc. They were cheap for a while but if you get over 15k contacts it's a crazy price if you are not a heavily monetised business and mostly just want to send newsletters not conversion funnel jank.

If you're in the EU you're also saving the GDPR fines. And the author probably saved 500 euros a year on a basic plan. But if you're on the top end plan you would save tens of thousands.

What GDPR fines are those, specifically?

Mail chimp stores it’s data in the us and German courts found that it breached GDPR because of US spy laws.

Wasn't that just the latest iteration of "EU pretends no other country in the world has similar national security laws to its own member states", under which multiple EU-US agreements on data sharing have already been struck down and technically any EU business probably can't use any US-based service ever if that involves sharing of personal data? Did this one get to the end of the process and result in a real fine or other penalty?

> Did this one get to the end of the process and result in a real fine or other penalty?

It did end with a judgement that it was in breach but the court didn't fine the company because they barely used Mailchimp and they stopped using it before it got to trial.

EDIT: I misread the grandparent post.

Not FUD there has been a court ruling on using mailchimp being a breach of GDPR.

Sorry, I completely misread your post. You're right. My point was actually closer to what you're saying.

I don’t think GDPR is applicable to private individuals running a newsletter..

GDPR as far as I know applies to anyone collecting data within the EU. But seriously the people who would think this is a great ad for mailchimp because the savings are so low are companies.

My understanding is that it applies globally, regarding data collected on EU citizens. Enforcement is obviously a question here.

Given the recent revelations that MailChimp is fact checking (reading) your email content and deciding whether they should not send it (i.e. the contemporary corporate censorship cause)... there may be more than cost for self hosting business applications

https://techstartups.com/2020/10/30/forget-big-tech-censorsh...