Recently, we had customers contacting us for matching the price with Sendy – a self hosted email newsletter app. You install it on your server and send newsletters using Amazon SES as the delivery platform. We wanted to list out a few reasons why it may not be such a good option after all. Initially, it does look quite incentive. It puts figures right to your face – 100x cheaper. And it may be quite true. However, there are things one must know before making such a purchase.
1. Deliverability problems
If you are not experienced with computers, you may find it difficult setting up the correct SPF and DKIM records for the domain you are sending from. If you haven’t set this up correctly, your emails have very less chance of getting through. It is also affected by the allocated IP reputation.
2. Feature Set
Sendy is still a developing platform. Its not a complete, fully fledged email marketing platform. It is there to give you minimal features and just like any other software, it also has bugs. They need to be routinely fixed. Our software has been developed from ground up. It is a fully functional email marketing software which is web-based just like Sendy.
3. Limits
Sendy uses Amazon SES to deliver the emails. Amazon SES has very strict barriers in place for new customers. They restrict to 50,000 emails/24 hours initially and depending on your credibility, you can apply for an increase. As your credibility increases, so will the number of emails you can send through Amazon SES. With us, you select a desired package and you can make use of all those email credits you purchased right away.
Overall, Sendy is a useful script for people who are starting out small and have the capacity/resources needed to setup and maintain their installation.
