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I need to send regular newsletters, as well as smaller batches, to a 10k strong mailing list, programmatically.

We're currently exporting our list and then using Campaign Monitor's web interface to create and send the newsletters. Campaign Monitor is great, but it is simply too expensive. Sending just one email to the entire list costs us $105, sending smaller batches is even more expensive as they charge 'per campaign'.

I have two requirements:

  1. I don't want to worry about bouncing, domain keys, black lists, ISPs, or any of that bs.
  2. I want a solution that is as cheap as possible.

My best bet seems to be using SendGrid (or something else?). It seems that they give you an SMTP server and they worry about all the crap in requirement 1. How does one actually use that to send email programmatically? Loop through the list and mail()? Seems like thats not very efficient. If you have experience with SendGrid, please share. This still isn't terribly cheap -- $80/mo -- but better than CM.

Alternatively, should I start looking at 'the cloud' as a solution. It would be cheaper it seems -- at least I'd be paying for what I'm using, but is it the same as rolling your own? Would I have to worry about the crap in requirement 1?

Or am I totally missing some other simpler solution? I really need help visualizing my options.

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closed as off topic by Kev Aug 19 '12 at 22:59


Just how many emails are you sending in total? –  Hamish Grubijan Jun 24 '10 at 19:15
On busy months it can be up to 40 thousand or so. Per newsletter it can be anywhere from a couple of hundred to a couple of thousand, depending on the segment. –  Nick Zalutskiy Jun 24 '10 at 19:20
I retagged this with the google-app-engine tag because I interpreted Nick's tagging of his question with google-app-engine as an indication that he was interested in whether GAE would be a reasonable solution to his question. –  David Underhill Jun 24 '10 at 19:59
Thats exactly right David, thank you. –  Nick Zalutskiy Jun 24 '10 at 21:43
Just create a simple Google Group –  giorgio79 Aug 29 '13 at 4:44

4 Answers 4

up vote 10 down vote accepted

I think GAE might be worth trying for your use case. It certainly should be cheaper than CM, and might be cheaper than SendGrid depending on how many recipients you e-mail.

Your volume of e-mails easily fits within GAE's limits. GAE allows e-mail to be sent to 2,000 recipients for free each day. Since you are willing to pay, you can send mail to up to 7,400,000 recipients per day. (Quota details)

If you go over the daily free quota of 2,000 recipients, you would have to pay $0.0001 per recipient.

This means you could e-mail about 860,000 recipients for $80/month (that works out to 28,666 per day [including 2,000 for free per day]). If you are e-mailing fewer people, then GAE may be cheaper than SendGrid. If you plan to e-mail more, then GAE will be more expensive.

Another advantage: with GAE, you may not have to worry as much about batching e-mails since GAE only charges per recipient.

Disadvantage of GAE: GAE also bills for other resources like CPU, bandwidth, etc. Depending on how you send e-mails and their content, you may or may not require more resources than GAE provides for free. You'll have to try it out to determine whether this will be an issue or not.

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I think for us, the cost of GAE would be negligible compared to CM and even SendGrid. However, the remaining question I have is deliverability. The primary reason for using SendGrid or CM is that they can take care of the signing of your email with domain keys, worry about bounce mails, ISP differences, etc. which means you can get through the spam filters. Is this something that GAE takes care of? –  Nick Zalutskiy Jun 24 '10 at 21:50
Unfortunately, I don't think GAE will be able to take care of your deliverability concerns as well as SendGrid [advertises]. In particular, GAE doesn't provide any documentation which suggests that it tries to avoid violating ISP rate limits or anything fancy like that. However, it still might be worth trying out app engine for a few mailings to see if it works acceptably for your needs. –  David Underhill Jun 24 '10 at 22:06
I think I'll give GAE a shot, the pricing is too attractive. For future generations: AuthSMTP is another alternative to SendGrid, but they don't offer anything in terms of analytics out of the box. –  Nick Zalutskiy Jun 25 '10 at 15:08
GAE didn't work out. I would have to roll too much extra plumbing: interfacing with GAE through REST, analytics, bounce handling. Enough to keep one busy for weeks. –  Nick Zalutskiy Jul 28 '10 at 14:47
Yes, GAE would be great idea - Subscribe is the service which helps you in setting up GAE - send email environment - By exposing APIs to your application. –  Love Sharma Jun 11 at 8:14

For the record, today (Jan 25, 2011) Amazon started to offer an email service (Amazon Simple Email Service http://aws.amazon.com/ses/). Email messages are charged at $0.10 per thousand.

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I saw that. I will likely check them out. SendGrid has been great so far, but I just can't ignore the huge price difference. –  Nick Zalutskiy Jan 26 '11 at 1:34

a good option for you would be Elastic Email. (http://elasticemail.com) EE is very competitively priced with all the bells and whistles and is a "pay as you go" service.

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A solution that might work is: Dada Mail

You can find it at DadaMailProject.com

They just released their latest version.

There is a free version (with Dada links at the bottom of each eMail).

There is a 50 $/year version (one payment, one year downloads, lifetime use of software).

You could get a cheap hosting (BlueHost.com suggested with not affiliation), and install Dada Mail there.

My 0.02!


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