[HN Gopher] Show HN: I made an open source Mailchimp RSS-to-Emai...
___________________________________________________________________
Show HN: I made an open source Mailchimp RSS-to-Email alternative
Hi all! Excited to share rss2newsletter after completing dev work
for the initial release. The idea for this project came out of
necessity, as I wanted to share my articles via email newsletter. I
was looking for a super minimal, lightweight, and open source
solution, and when none existed, I decided to create one. For any
sizable number of email recipients, a popular platform like
Mailchimp will easily cost you hundreds or even thousands per month
in per-contact fees. rss2newsletter, on the other hand, allows you
to use Amazon SES, so you can reach your audience at pennies on the
dollar. Beyond these factors, I also wanted something that could
run on an internet-connected potato it's so easy on your system and
fully automated so you can set it and forget it. So, I created
(and put under a free software license):
https://github.com/ElliotKillick/rss2newsletter rss2newsletter
(integrating with Listmonk and Amazon SES for ultra-low-cost
emails) is a drop-in solution that requires almost no setup besides
connecting with SES and styling your emails. It's also competitive
at what it does with proprietary self-hosted solutions like Sendy,
which requires your system/VPS to have some rather beefy specs to
run well. Let me know if there are any other features you would
like to see. I hope you can find my project helpful to you!
Author : elliotkillick
Score : 37 points
Date : 2024-07-07 15:26 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (github.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
| browningstreet wrote:
| I was surprised, coming back to newsletters, how many newsletter
| platforms don't support RSS-to-newsletter. I've hacked a work-
| around that I'm not happy with, but I look forward to digging
| into this.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| A lot of devs and PMs under age 30 have never heard of RSS, or
| if they have it's not something they ever used, and not top-of-
| mind when it comes to features.
| browningstreet wrote:
| Maybe, but another thought I had while scanning newsletter
| services is that they haven't really evolved or changed in
| many years. Substack would suggest email isn't quite dead,
| but email feels at-risk. That said, I support both
| newsletters and Substack but I do a lot of manual copy-and-
| pasting. I also had to hand-code my own Wordpress newsletter
| content script to generate something that could then be
| cross-deployed to newsletters.
|
| None of it feels like an ecosystem.. it feels like feature
| sets that atrophied about 10 years ago, and lack any ongoing
| creativity or innovation or product development.
| pacifika wrote:
| Just what I was looking for. Thanks!
| elliotkillick wrote:
| My pleasure!
| pacifika wrote:
| I built a simple self hosting micro blogging platform which
| can also ingests rss feeds and turn them into posts (lamb --
| it's in alpha) so that could produce a master feed and hook
| nicely into this.
| elliotkillick wrote:
| For sure, converting feeds into emails in that direction is
| something I've seen as a sticking point for a lot of
| projects. I'm glad I could fill that gap for you.
| qudat wrote:
| Very cool! We built something similar but is not self hosted:
| https://pico.sh/feeds
|
| How do you handle Reddit feeds? We found those to be tricky to
| get right because it seems like Reddit doesn't want you to use
| rss
| elliotkillick wrote:
| Oh, nice! I recall Reddit did support RSS at one point, I
| didn't realize they limited it. rss2newsletter is only ~300
| lines of code right now and I'd prefer to keep it more on the
| minimal side of things. But, that's definitely a cool feature
| to have.
| CPLX wrote:
| This is great and very happy to see it. Mailchimp is annoyingly
| expensive for what it is.
|
| With that said the sending of the emails is the easy part.
| Deliverability is hard.
|
| Sending via SES is pretty likely to go straight to spam folders
| or worse. Granted if it's 100% opt-in and you have the kind of
| audience that will hunt for the email and mark it as valid you'll
| probably improve and be ok long term but it's something to think
| about.
| elliotkillick wrote:
| Thanks! In my personal experience, I've had success delivering
| to the inboxes of Gmail, Outlook, and Zoho Mail with SES.
| However, my newsletter is entirely opt-in on my website. When I
| signed up for SES, there was a human review as to what I would
| be sending. So, I think Amazon understands spam is an issue,
| too.
|
| Listmonk supports many email providers though, if your needs
| outgrow SES.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2024-07-07 23:01 UTC)