> I don’t like mailchimp and find the pricing to be atrocious for my purposes (emailing 5k people once or twice a year).

Have you looked at MailerLite[1]?

[1] https://www.mailerlite.com/

Email Octopus[1] are great, and 50% cheaper again than MailerLite

for 5k-10k people, on monthly plan:

Mailchimp: $80

MailerLite: $50

EmailOctopus: $24

[1] https://emailoctopus.com

Thanks I'll check it out! What doesn't sit well with me is that someone can send weekly emails to 2k subscribers for free, but if I want to be respectful of people and not spam them all the time, I end up paying much more to send way fewer emails.

I’m in the same boat here. I had a list of ~15,000 blog readers at some point, but gave up sending emails when most services wanted to charge me $1000~$2000/year, even when I only wanted to send 1-2 emails a year.

If there are any services that allow me to import my previous list and email them (very) occasionally for a reasonable price, I’d love to know about them.

If the source of the email signups was a blog, I feel like you can very reasonably use substack. I feel a little dicey doing so for my startup, but I may end up doing it and sending out hybrid email updates/blog posts.

This looks like it's slightly cheaper than MailChimp for transactional emails, at least for the 'starter' level subscription.

Use ListMonk. Its an open source software. Used and developed by a unicorn.

kind of unsolicited advice here but if you're running a mailing list for a startup you should be emailing it more than once or twice a year so that people can build a relationship with you... at least thats the traditional email marketing advice. you do you of course

As an end user I don't want companies to email me often to establish relationship, but if I were a company I would follow your advice. What a world of suffering we live in.

I am personally allergic to spam, and I treat others as if they are the same. You're right that I should realize that the people who sign up for our email list are genuinely excited about our products and want to hear every time we win an award or launch a new partnership. I just dread seeing those unsubscribes, knowing that I've just pissed someone off...