Not familiar with MailChimp, but we use Mailgun (could be any similar system for the sake of argument) and there is a heck of a lot more than just having clean IPs.

Every time I use one of their screens to look at some issue I think... There's a bunch of stuff we didn't have to build, all for $80 per month.

Oh sure, they have a lot of other stuff.

And all that other stuff would be a nice package that you would probably be able to buy for $99.

It's the market that https://sendy.co/ is in, but we would have plenty of competition there and better options.

The reason it is only Sendy and a few open source proj's are that SES delivery is not even in the same ballpark as Mailchimp's (I have used both).

And if you want the delivery, you need to pay for Mailchimp or Mailjet anyways. Its the reason you don't save much when sending via the Mailchimp API. The product is not the newsletter builder etc.

Any company who can afford to use Mailchimp already has an email channel that works extremely well; you have to, in order to do business. How does someone even sign up for Mailchimp if they can’t already email reliably?

Mailchimp is a SaaS, and the value is in the software, just like any SaaS. Specifically the value of email platforms comes from list management, compliance, integrations, branding, etc., all of which are hard to do with the basic-but-reliable email systems we use every day.

That is not correct. The magic is in IP maintenance. Source: I wrote the software.

Back when sending emails was about 1 cent per email, my company wrote our own campaign email software to save tons of money. Each large email provider has its own rules about sending rates, backing off, soft bounces and hard bounces. Not getting your IP address blocked for breaking a ruleset that you don't know about is the hardest thing. A few year later MailChimp was becoming more popular and their prices where dropping; we switched almost everything over immediately and life was much easier.

This would be true if Mailchimp had a competitive advantage in deliverability, which they don’t. Source: I have evaluated Mailchimp as an ESP several times and selected competitors.

None of the ESPs beat our corporate email system on deliverability BTW. They did make it a lot easier to manage email programs, though.

Edit to add, I’m sure IP reputation management is a challenge if your business model is to allow anyone to sign up for free and start sending. Paying clients don’t care about that, though. Deliverability is something you can buy from lots of people. And for small folks, you’re not going to beat the deliverability of Gmail. It’s table stakes IMO. There’s a reason Mailchimp sells itself as a marketing software platform and not “we deliver emails”.

Their competitive advantage in deliverability is their client list. You can't divine yourself a massive volume of legitimate and engaging traffic. MC had to answer to literally no one, and we got to fire any customer we wanted.