I've got a giveaway coming up and I anticipate 50k people to enter. After they enter, they receive a 16 part autoresponder series. Some of the giveaway software have e-mail autoresponders built-in, but those particular giveaway softwares don't satisfy my needs. The one that I will most likely end up using requires a separate e-mail service. Which as you know, it's expensive as fuck to store a 50k e-mail list on traditional e-mail services like Mailchimp, MailerLite, Aweber, etc. During the giveaway itself, I'll be sending a ton of e-mails, but afterwards, just the occasional follow-up. So it's stupid to pay upwards of $200/month for traditional e-mail services so I've been looking for other solutions, which led me to Sendy.

Sendy utilizes Amazon SES which costs $0.10 per 1000 e-mails sent. Sendy itself just costs $59 and the updates are like $30/year or something insignificant. The other expense is an SMTP server to host Sendy. And that's what I'm researching now. Below is a live compilation of my notes. At the time you're reading this post, there may not be a solution listed. For now I'm just using this page to keep track of my research.

Amazon SES + Sendy Resources

Came across this guide: https://colcol.co.uk/
*Great guide about how to use Amazon SES + Sendy + Amazon EC2. However I don't condone the site author monetizing the website through linking to a GPL abusers/reseller. However the info is good.

Sendy Hosts

https://sendy.co/forum/discussion/comment/6034 – A discussion about the best hosting providers to use with Sendy and Amazon SES. It definitely seems like the least expensive way to go is to use Amazon EC2 as the host, but setup is complex. And anyone who says “it's easy” is more techie than you and I.

https://easysendy.com/ – A hosted solution for Sendy that connects to your Amazon SES account. Plans start at $19/month to $349/mo. I'd be at $59/month for up to 100k subscribers.

Amazon SES + Sendy Pros

It all comes down to money. The biggest pro is the money you can save.

Amazon SES + Sendy Cons

It sounds like a technical nightmare. I'm a pretty techy guy but time is money and I don't necessarily want to put time I don't have into troubleshooting software installations and e-mail deliverability issues. Traditional e-mail marketing services are expensive but at least they work and offer support. I'd be on my own making this setup work.

Sendy Alternatives

https://emailoctopus.com/ – Plans between $10 and $109 / month. My 50k list would cost me $39/month and the next tier up is $59/month for 100k e-mails. Plus the cost of Amazon SES of course. This looks the most promising because I don't have to install Sendy or do anything technical. E-mail Octopus is sort of positioning themselves as the in-between self-hosted Sendy and traditional e-mail marketing services.

Thoughts

Email Octopus or Easy Sendy look like the happy mediums I'm looking for. No installs. No chron jobs. No dealing with utilizing 6 different Amazon services to do a simple e-mail list. If I could get Sendy working myself on Amazon SES + E2C, I'd save more money, but time is money, and I don't have the time to learn how to do all that. E-mail Octopus and Easy Sendy both look legit but it's hard to know if they work well or not without testing. Have you used either?

What do you say about all this?

Suggestions and feedback welcome. Thank you.