I’ve seen a LOT of people posting about newsletter issues lately. Either prices have gone up, or they won’t send. Or they can’t grow because unsubscribes will get their hand smacked, etc etc etc. I had these issues in the beginning. And then I solved them.

I tried to join a newsletter builder when I first started, and got like 2500 emails. Out of that, around 100 unsubscribed with the first newsletter I sent. For anyone else, that’s an amazing retention rate. I was freaking ecstatic! SendInBlue however… was not. They demanded I send in details of how I’d gotten my list. Did that, they unlocked me. Next newsletter, had around 20 unsubscribes. Still great! Nope. Got locked again. Was warned that if I stepped a toenail out of line, I’d get locked again and this time they wouldn’t unlock me. Mind you, I’d paid for an entire year in advance.

Hesitantly, I prepared to send my 3rd month’s newsletter. It barely even started sending before they closed my account. No one had even unsubscribed yet. At that point, I’d been shut down for simply using the service I had paid for. I didn’t get a refund, either. Hoo boy, I was hot.

I searched for different options, but they were all so expensive. The one that wasn’t expensive didn’t ask for an address to be included which was shady as hell and could get me in buckets of trouble, so I said no thanks. I gave up on a newsletter for a long time. The next one I found and used for a bit ended up having a server crash, and I lost everything.

Then, I found Sendy. You pay one time for the program, and it’s yours to keep. You hook into Amazon SES, so mailing is dirt cheap every month and reliability is rock solid. They don’t care about how many subscribers you have or how many unsubscribes you get per mailing, because they’re friggin huge and it’s a drop in the bucket to them. I get 50k emails a day, can have as many subscribers as I want, and I pay $7 for my server a month and like $0.27 for my SES service, since I only send once a month. That’s it.

You can have separate “brands” for each business and pen name you have, with whole separate lists. You get the same graphs and information you get with any other mailing list provider, but this time YOU own it. It’s quick, it’s solid, and I’ve never had any deliverabily problems. I can segment my lists, set up auto-responders and drips, and do pretty much anything I want to do. There’s a WYSIWYG editor, but I had a friend work me up a fun template that I use… so you can use any email template service and pop it into the HTML section to create your custom newsletter.

Amazon SES can be a bit of a headache to set up at first, but once you reassure them that you aren’t buying your subscribers or planning on sending out spam, they’re pretty accomodating. Below are some screenshots of the inner working of the system, the graphs, and here’s an example of an HTML templated newsletter created with it.