I appreciate that the author disclosed it, but the reason they went to all this effort is likely that they expect to make money as an affiliate for the platforms that they recommended.
Affiliate-driven reviews introduce a major bias into the author's opinion, as they have incentive to speak more positively about platforms that are likely to pay the most.
And email marketing platforms pay a lot in affiliate fees. Just scanning some of the recommendations, if someone signs up for MailerLite through this reviewer's link, they'll pay the reviewer 30% of that subscriber's fees forever.[0] I wouldn't be surprised if the reviewer's top pick is coincidentally the platform with the highest-paying affiliate program.
The thing that really woke me up to affiliate-influenced reviews was the 2017 article, "The War To Sell You A Mattress Is An Internet Nightmare."[1] The reporter figured out that top YouTube mattress reviewers just gave positive reviews to whichever company paid the most in affiliate fees, and when one company lowered their fees, the reviewers retroactively downranked them for contrived reasons.
Op here. I sort of agree but all these tools offer affiliate programs and I can assure you we chose MailerLite because we think it’s a tool we can use for 5-10 years.
That being said: besides running a startup (Atlist.com) I also run an affiliate site (it’s how we funded Atlist) and I would agree there is good reason to read affiliate websites skeptically. I regularly receive offers from website builders to “buy” the top spot in my best website builder roundup. https://www.sitebuilderreport.com/best-website-builder
This is completely ridiculous dude, Op you are so critical of everyone else trying to make a buck don't you think there should be a bloody big disclaimer/ acknowledgement about your own twisted incentives there.
Ohhhh and on this step we eliminated all the companies that don't have an affiliate program.. hmm but we'll say it's because they don't have feature x....
Don't pretend that the positioning and font aren't both chosen to minimize the likelihood that people see and read that line. At least without violating legal disclosure requirements.
While I think (as others say) we should not police op's time, I would like to know what is the reasoning the used when choosing between focusing and not having all your eggs in one basket.
I think arguments by people making these choices would be very educational to me (as a person with a bit of a scatterd brain).
- A company I worked for wanted to be 100% focused on doing one thing. It was spending 10x more than it was making revenue. It went bankrupt.
- Another company I worked for always insisted on not having all eggs in one basket. There was one big revenue maker that dwarfed the others though. The company is still around and doing well.
I have quite a scattered brain too so I get the appeal of "choosing to focus". But looking others do it I see the risks : refusing to experiment and learn new stuff, or find new opportunities.
EDIT: I'd like to add that focusing or not focusing is not a useful dichotomy, it's more about finding the right "exploration vs exploitation" balance.
And you wouldn't know this incentive until it was through comments here.
The listicle tried to paint every other company making money as a scourge and the op as the only good guy trying to find the best deal for users when ophas the most corrupt incentives since those incentives are not even documented in a bloody helpdesk article somewhere.
One might take a moment to consider why the best sites run on affiliate revenue and the rest no longer exist or have been bought up by giant corporations.
Give it a rest. I have no idea how HN is allowing you to post these many "responses" to people's criticism of an article you posted without throttling you for spamming. 20% of all the comments on this article right now are yours and you're taking mostly very uncharitable interpretations of peoples' comments.
I see these same affiliate listicles every time I try to find software for any use case these days. Basically every Saas category has now turned into a giant affiliate marketing cesspool. Doesn't matter if it's GPT-written blogspam on Google search or highly produced "creator" content on Youtube...it's all the same motivation behind the content: buy via my link.
As much as people hated the display advertising common on the old internet, I'd actually argue this is far worse.
Instead of clear delineation between what's an ad and what's content, combining the two together just creates even more sinister incentives. Even the most good-hearted, honest and trustworthy "creators" can't escape those incentives over time. I've seen so many of my favorite creators head down that path I just expect it at this point.
Even the formerly trustworthy Wirecutter has lost its reliability post-NYT acquisition, clearly favoring products that offer affiliate payouts.
Instead of criticizing my article, you’re criticizing me.
Does the content of my article seem dishonest?
I agree affiliate content should be read skeptically but you also have to be realistic: why would anyone go to all this work if not for some financial incentive?
Their comment seems much more directed at the incentives and outcomes of affiliate/content marketing than it does at you personally, so it’s weird to pretend it’s a personal attack.
Especially when you underscore the incentive issues with your closing question: if the only reason you can imagine going to the effort of a substantial review is financial incentive, that in itself is a pretty good criticism.
BOTH people are distorted by the wrong incentives.
It is NOT a question of being pedantic. They're literally not criticizing you when they criticize your incentives. I think this critique is from a board with relatively high percentage of systems-type thinkers.
I wasn’t criticizing you specifically, but yes, your article does seem dishonest.
Your evaluation criteria was downright silly (1), you didn’t actually try most of these tools, and your “top pick” has the highest affiliate payout (and longest affiliate window) on the list.
In fact, I have no idea how this article hasn’t been flagged since low quality affiliate listicles generally don’t make the front page here.
(1) Strict pricing models and not supporting web fonts like Inter are features, not bugs. Cheap platforms have crap quality shared IPs and 70%+ of inboxes (including most Gmail/outlook clients) don’t support web fonts at all. You’re designing something nobody will see correctly:
https://www.caniemail.com/features/css-at-font-face/
Yet you felt the need to come post it to HN to give it a boost. It’s not like you wrote it in good faith and it organically found its way here. This is pure and simple the exact kind of content that drips of bias and deserves all the skepticism it’s receiving here in the comments.
This is silly. Do you have a job where you make a paycheck? Would you spend the same amount of time doing what you do at your job for the company that employs you if they didn’t pay you?
If not, then you also would not put in a bunch of work on anything simply for fun or fame
We're saying that after every single recommendation you should make it bloody clear that you are profiting from this and how much? So people can make the independent decision about whether your 'reasearxh' is to be trusted or thrown in the garbage like it is.
We recommend software products too but don't hide behind euphemisms and hide our commissions.
And it’s not as simple as cross-checking their public affiliate offers because these types of companies are always offering higher, private payouts (in exchange for editorial control).
I believe there's a strong case for all articles containing a hash (MD5, etc) in the URL a la Bluesky, or verifiable meta data (easily verifiable, like the browser bar padlock for HTTPS), even blockchain, to show something's been edited.
The article is “I tried every top email marketing tool” and starts with eliminating a majority of the field based on an arbitrary rubric of what the author specifically is looking for. Then fails to compare essentially anything about the tools to provide any semblance of a useful review for any other person to consume for their own research. I have to agree with the other poster that this really just seems to be a reasonable attempt to get affiliate link click throughs.
Everyone is free to pick their own criteria, but the fact that this article doesn’t even seem to mention deliverability as a factor is very confusing.
The degree to which your emails actually reach people’s inbox is the most important thing BY FAR and there is considerable variability between platforms on this metric.
I also find Mailchimp’s pricing and dark patterns extremely frustrating but it also has the best deliverability of any platform I have tried by a mile, which can’t just be hand-waved away.
Deliverability, price, pricing model, api/automation, UI, email builders, support, etc.
The article is just “why we chose breva” and is very specific to you. As far as I can tell you didnt even use half of the offerings since they were ruled out purely due to pricing models.
EDIT: just an example. If I wanted to know about sendgrid and how it compares, the only information this page gives me is “it has an overage charge”. How am I supposed to consume this article as an informative comparison?
This is not a universal comparison. This is the story about how I tried 25 email marketing tools. I’m sharing my subjective experience. You might be looking for something that my article doesn’t claim to offer.
Great article. Thanks for writing it all up. A followup article on deliverability would be helpful as many people seem to only have a surface level understanding of the difficulties of deliverability.
With bigger and more expensive email providers like Mailchimp, you're ultimately paying for higher deliverability.
For startups just getting going with waiting list signups and newsletters, there are a few basic rules to staying out of the spam folder and Promotions tab.
1. Make sure SPF, DKIM and DMARC are setup properly
2. Always "warm up" a new domain and outbound email address
Double opt-in where people have to either reply (highest signal) or click to confirm their email address tremendously helps warm up email. It's also important to slowly ramp up send volume over a few weeks or months and then keep send volume relatively consistent.
3. Consider using a warm up service that auto sends to and replies from an existing pool of recipient email addresses. It can help land your emails in the Primary inbox.
4. Watch out for shared IP addresses that end up on blacklists. If newsletters and emails are important to your biz growth, it's worth getting a dedicated IP address. Just be sure to warm it up properly.
5. Watch out for spam trigger words. Crypto, supplements, etc. It's an ever evolving list of words and phrases that bump up spam scores. Tools like https://www.mail-tester.com/ are useful for checking email config and spam scores.
It's not an issue of being too hard to understand.
The moment I say "double opt in", marketing will decide I lack the skills to be involved in mail and deliverability will be placed in the hands of someone with a graphics design background that has never heard of dns.
I've seen it in every single place I've tried to help marketing campaigns for over 20 years.
It is a comms issue. You are fighting quantity vs quality and the default thought, though incredibly wrong headed, is "the more comms we send the more people hear the message the more we sell." Education around send quality doesn't always make sense on the surface.
You want engaged customers/contacts. The right message to the right customer at the right time to sell whatever you are selling. The worse you do this, the worse the delivery reputation, the less you land in the inbox.
These other decision makers know they don't personally want nor respond to spam. They have to realize that their customers feel the same.
I know it's in widespread use through the online marketing sphere, but I really dislike that phrase.
If I give you an email address, until it has been confirmed - by means of you sending me an email which I have to confirm I've received by whatever means - it's not "opted-in" by any sane definition.
> A followup article on deliverability would be helpful as many people seem to only have a surface level understanding of the difficulties of deliverability.
Good analysis. One correction though, EmailOctopus does offer auto-plan downgrades. Screenshot of the billing page on our account: https://share.cleanshot.com/VJdQPrjP
After trying a few also we ended up with EmailOctopus because of simplicity (we only send plain text emails) and cost. The trick was using their Connect [1] plans so it could send via our AWS account, which is cheaper (we pay $30/mo for the 10,0000 subscriber plan).
I also tried Loops and wanted to love it since they're perfect for SaaS companies, but back when I tried them we just got a ton of spam subscribers since they didn't have any built-in mitigation, so our list (and cost) grew.
But that was in their very early days, so I assume they've resolved it by now and I'd like to try them again at some point since they're much more modern and purpose-built for SaaS (and a YC company).
CEO of EmailOctopus here. I was just about to offer this clarification, so thanks for commenting! Confirming that we offer auto-plan downgrades (and if you prefer it to not be automatic, as a lot of people do, you can manually increase/decrease your tier at any time).
In the "you had one job" category of things to look at from an email marketing tool:
What about email deliverability?
Deliverability refers to the percentage of emails you send that actually make it into your contacts' inboxes.
The tool you choose can impact deliverability. However, it’s a complex topic, and I won’t dive into the details here. If this is something you’re concerned about, there are experts far more knowledgeable than me who can explain it thoroughly.
This ought to be disclaimed at the top instead of the end.
Or unless your emails matter to your customers, with you seeing them as individual names instead of spray and pray marketing.
Deliverability is the single most important thing to reach individuals in the first place, even more critical to maintain the transactional or workflow email relationship.
Anthropic right now has an issue where their "passwordless" emails go to junk for M365 customers (85% of SMBs in U.S.), people literally can't use the service since the email isn't delivered to the inbox.
To your point, in a past gig helping thousands of businesses with turning contacts into not just buyers but fans, I discovered mass marketers don't really care about deliverability at the level of "every single communication must land with every person".
At the same time, I learned customers you want to build a relationship with very much do care. Ever since, when evaluating these, I start there, even before price. How many communications, transactions, or workflows with a future buyer with intent are you willing to fail to connect?
"You had one job" means the primary, not only, dimension. Yes, the primary job of a mailer is for the mail to get there.
That's just one current example of when email delivery matters, likely to resonate with HN as being senders and receivers they recognize struggling with this. Not just a Microsoft thing, we can talk about a dozen where Gmail files things wrongly as well, and where the common element is the mailer.
These mailers all have different levels of trust and deliverability stats. It's critical to know.
I don't think you're getting what I'm saying here. If an email provider is throwing away wanted messages from legitimate senders because of some "trust" metric, then it is that email provider's reponsibility, not the sender's, to make damned sure that doesn't cause the loss of desired email.
You are of course correct that neither GMail nor Microsoft 365 or Hotmail or whatever they call it this week is suitable for any serious use.
You don’t have deny the responsibility of the relevant authorities to properly maintain hiking trails, in order to place responsibility on a hiking guide to safely get you along poorly maintained trails.
> That ("Anthropic's" deliverability issue) is a Microsoft issue.
Emphasizing this. Validation emails sent to Microsoft hosted email are at high risk of never arriving.
For at least 2 years I've seen this on MS's free, paid and enterprise/hosted services. The issue is per validator; mails all arrive or none ever will. Generally I'll try again months later and find that service is still blocked.
Anthropic has a lot of issues. I tried paying them and my card is rejected without explanation.
I tried different cards, addresses, even a VPN. Nothing works. After googling a bit I found on Reddit that this is very common. I don't thinks their investors are happy with them not accepting customers.
If it doesn't matter whether or not your emails arrive you are a spammer. If it does, you apparently don't just communicate based on volume and have something to say that matters. I think you have this inverted.
Interesting point about charging for unsubscribed contacts!
I am building an Open Source email marketing platform (https://www.keila.io) and our current pricing model only considers the amount of emails you send, not the number of contacts/subscribers.
I've been thinking about switching to charging per contacts instead – and I probably wouldn't have considered not including unsubscribed contacts if they're still stored on the platform. But now I will, thanks!
I haven't figured out email marketing yet for my startup, but I'll give Kiela a try. Love open source, and would rather pay for emails then contacts. And mailchimp sucks.
This is very relevant to my industry (escape rooms). Our mailing lists quickly reach 10,000+ and unsubscribes happen often.
I was so focused on deliverability with Mailchimp that I didn’t realize (until I just checked) that I’ve been paying for 2,000 unsubscribers. I had assumed I wasn’t. Deleting them would have moved me down a tier. Strongly considering MailerLite now.
Presumably it would also have lost your record of the fact that they'd already asked to not get your email. So you'd have added them back to the spam list if they ever dealt with you again, so they'd have to unsubscribe again.
Spam has gotten so normalized that not only are people not even pretending to get opt-ins, but they don't see why they should have to pay any real attention to opt-outs.
Yes, you are a spammer, and so are most of the businesses on the Internet at this point.
Can’t agree with MailerLite. I have 6,000 subscribers and literally all I want to do is send them an email maybe once a month, along with:
- An API to sign up to the list
- A welcome email automation
That’s all. And I pay like $700 annually for that. When they sent me an email the other day of all of the features my plan has - none (not one!) applied to what I actually use it for! I don’t need ecom functions, a website builder, AI, none of that. I’m frustrated that there doesn’t seem to be a product for me.
It's interesting to note none of the email tools I'm most familiar with are mentioned by the author. It's clear the author is a different demographic from me given they said they want to stay under $200/mo. Some of the tools I hear companies use the most are:
$100/month for less than most mail providers offer free, and $1000/month for standard features is only for startups trying to burn money before they get off the runway.
Sad to not see a mention of tracking, i.e. the ability to disable open-tracking or click-tracking. Some services even have it disabled by default to respect subscribers’ privacy but sadly they weren’t included in the article. Some examples: Buttondown, Mailcoach, SendStack. No affiliation, I just researched them in the past (https://blog.daniemon.com/2022/11/15/privacy-first-newslette...)
I want to share my experience with D2C (direct to client) brand email marketing. Initially, I was creating HTML emails with react-email and sending them through Postmark's broadcast stream. The open rates were very good - 40-50%, and it had solid deliverability.
When we wanted to improve our marketing automation, I decided to try Klaviyo because many people online recommended it. I spent around 500 euros and 3-4 days to integrate it with my custom ecommerce platform. After sending 2 campaigns, the open rate dropped to 15%. Later I discovered Klaviyo put us on a shared IP with not-so-good senders, so my emails were going to spam folder.
This made me think - how difficult would it be to build some of Klaviyo's features myself? Especially because I was already collecting customer behavior data like item views and checkout steps.
I connected everything to Postmark and used their webhooks for analytics (opens, clicks, spam). Now I have a good in-house email marketing system that costs only $20 per month on Postmark, and my open rates are back to normal, as the profits too.
Sometimes the "simple" (hah) solution is the best one.
I don't have a horse in this race, but I came across Postmark[1] several years ago and thought to myself if I ever needed to send marketing emails — or transactional for that matter — I'd give them my business. They seem.. nice.
Anyways, I'm surprised to not see them mentioned or considered at all. Did they fly under the radar or do I just have the wrong impression of them?
Postmark is owned by Active Campaign, which was included in OPs list, though I'm not sure how the Postmark product differs from the original Active Campaign product.
I've been using Postmark for hobby projects for the past three years, and I've been happy with them, but my needs are super minimal - just sending out <100 emails per month programmatically where latency doesn't matter.
A previous employer used Postmark around the time they got acquired, I recommended they find another supplier but left sometime after.
Back then they were rather convenient and we didn't have any problems with tainted IP addresses, not sure if their new rather villainous owner has changed the Postmark business. I kind of expect them to pull IP addresses in through the email sending business to build reputation and then promote them to the ad delivery business.
I particularly thought this part was really fascinating, where they start complaining about a EMAIL SPAM SPECIALIST COMPANY which uses, surprise surprise, shady email marketing list sign-up tactics. It does what it says on the label, as the saying goes.
"5. Scammy Email Tactics
Then there’s their sneaky signup process. When creating an account, there’s a checkbox that reads: “By NOT checking this box, I agree to receive promotional emails.""
Great article, it must have been a lot of work (I've been on the very same road), so I'd do the same with some affiliate links.
I ran away from Mailchimp more than 5 years ago when they started with their shenanigans and arrived at the same conclusion: Mailerlite is great. I used to have lots of respect for Mailchimp for being a bootstrapped business and never taking investor money but once they sold their soul, it was game over. One thing the article doesn't mention is the fact that Mailchimp has been moving from an email marketing SaaS to a marketing platform SaaS. From a quick glance at their services, they now offer a website builder, a CRM, ads retargeting, social media integrations---and as a customer, you end up paying for every single feature, regardless of if you want it or not.
There's one tool worth mentioning that was missing from the list: High Level.
It's commonly known and used in the agency and marketing world. Search for "go high level" on YouTube. Every marketer I know switched from ClickFunnels (reviewed in article) to High Level. It uses Mailgun on the backend for email delivery or can connect directly to SMTP.
If you need a CRM with AI features, calendars, newsletters, funnels, etc. then High Level is worth considering. I've been using it for a couple years and love it. For startups, it's a cheaper alternative to HubSpot.
I used HighLevel for 2 years and have gone to the HL Summit. HighLevel is good, but it's a Zoho-burger: A mish-mashed suite of features, products, and toolset that each deliver a 6-7/10 rating on their own, with the promise of convenience by having those feature suites in 1 place.
For those using HighLevel, they're usually saving up to use HubSpot for their clients as an agency or freelance marketer - as I did. HighLevel is just a budgetary HubSpot.
This. I have been searching for SES on this discussion and nobody seems to be using it except perhaps you and I. My email marketing costs are a fraction of all the providers listed in the article thanks to AWS SES. And building a small custom solution with AWS SES APIs is almost trivial.
A big driver of the right tool is your overall send volume and customer record count. Both of these will also influence pricing.
Even for smaller shops, would recommend checking out some of the big players (eg Adobe, Salesforce Marketing Cloud, Eloqua, Twilio, etc) as they have entry level lower tiers that may end up costing less over time than some of these startup focused solutions (which all seem to nickel and dime you and hit you up with various types of overage charges), and will get you much higher deliverability, automation, and integration capabilities.
I love the idea of a breakdown like this, but so many of the author's deal-killers are not relevant for most startups (the audience here). This is more of a list of solo freelancers.
Adding our recent experience with Klaviyo.
Klaviyo charges by "profile". When paired with Shopify, it automatically imports / pulls customer information 5o it's servers even when the customer specifically opted out of marketing.
First month, we were debited 3500EU for opted-out profiles that they had auto-pulled, against the consent of customers and us.
Even with the CEO looped in on emails, we had to threaten chargebacks before they refunded.
They also refused to remove data under our official GDPR request.
I don’t remember how, but you can lock in a lower tier plan and they will stop sending emails for the month once you hit that thresold. I have a small store that uses the free tier like this for automatic emails and when we need to send promotional emails we just use Shopify native email app which is 100x cheaper than klaviyo
That explains why that box hasn't worked when I've used Shopify stores before. I couldn't be bothered to take them to task individually, but I figured they were using some kind of crappy "legitimate interest" basis.
If Brevo is one of the best, I am sceptical. I've had he displeasure of using it this year and the tools they offer are very iffy. But even ignoring that, the service is often down. I was often trying to edit a template, but it would not work because you keep getting a message like "something went wrong" and nothing gets displayed.
You can build kind of blocks that you use, but for anything more complex you're pretty much forced to use a kind of free HTML field, which of course is just a text field where you either suffer by editing html and their templating system in a browser text field (the templating is something Django compatible) or you copy and paste from your text editor which is also a form of torture. I've edited the wrong template on occasion, and saved it. Even if you just stick to their wysiwyg you still have to sometimes add conditional blocks and this also is for me anyway difficult. They have developer mode too, which is your email as a giant yaml.
So they support a bunch of things, but personally I would not use it for anything except simple marketing campaigns. We do use it for that, but someone had the idea of having all customer emails go through it, and I don't really like it.
I didnt find any email marketing platform that made sense pricing wise for a B2C product with a free tier. They all get stupidly expensive even if most of your customers wont read the email and likely won't pay you anything. Same problem as the authentication space that charge per logged-in user.
Your deliverability is going to be trash in Gmail if you’re keeping a bunch of free users who don’t open your emails on your list.
Email is expensive on purpose to incent customers into following good practices. Otherwise you attract all the worst customers (“let’s email everybody who’s ever interacted with us for a decade, regardless of if they want our emails!”). Then Gmail starts putting all emails sent on the cheap platforms IPs to spam by default.
Based on your practices, it sounds like these pricing models are doing their job of correctly scaring you away.
This is just basic email deliverability 101 stuff.
Gmail's algorithm has really tightened up this year. Open your spam folder right now and you'll probably see more than a few legit businesses in there.
Basically if your engagement (opens, clicks, unsubscribes, complaints, etc as a percentage of total sends) is poor enough, Gmail will dump you in spam by default. They don't just "trust" that you have permission to email the people you're emailing. So many businesses abuse this, and they're incentivized to keep your inbox clean so you keep visiting your inbox (and click those Gmail ads!).
If you're getting low/declining engagement over time the algo just assumes you have poor sending practices, which to be honest, if that's happening, you probably do.
It's probably 101 stuff, but I just set up the appropriate records to authenticate the domain and didn't think about it again. It's not a big part of my responsibilities.
So the word deliverability includes making it past spam filters?
Absolutely, yea it’s all about keeping a clean, tight, high engagement list.
Then your domain reputation will be good because Gmail/outlook’s algo will see good numbers coming from your domain. Then the only thing you have to worry about is your IP rep (which comes from the platform you’re using — basically “are you sending from a platform that has high standards for customers and zealously guards their IPs”).
You can spend $thousands on consultants and what they’ll tell you will basically just boil down to that.
I was expecting OP to trash Klaviyo, since I had a really bad experience with how expensive they get if you click the wrong button and choose to be charged based on your email list size, only to find out that the market is filled with bad examples like that.
Thanks, it was an interesting read. It's a shame MailChimp became so scammy, they used to be okay. I guess they are trying to squeeze every penny out of their customers, disregarding any reputational damage.
It's like you gave 1000 monkeys access to stack overflow with two buttons - one to copy and one to paste, then you trained an LLM on the garbage they produce, and then you asked the same monkeys to write a prompt for the LLM to write an email campaign manager...
Seriously Sendy is without a doubt the worst piece of software I've ever had the displeasure of reading the source code, ever. It makes Wordpress look like a well architected marvel of software engineering.
Sendy takes the hyperbole about junior developers copy and pasting code they don't understand to whole new levels.
Your main headline claims you tried every email marketing tool. (“Top” is only in the HN title, and even then I don’t know if Adobe Marketo doesn’t qualify as “top”.)
Every “top” marketing tool.
Obviously it’s not possible to try all tools, there are probably thousands.
“Top” is a subjective category so OP just evaluated most relevant tools probably.
Going to get downvoted for this - but I don’t know how spam is just considered OK and normal. We’re all bombarded with garbage every day. Managing my inbox is more annoying than ever. Just stop it already.
I use it to help drive engagement with the product for paying subscribers to introduce features that they have not used and invite them to training webinars.
https://www.mailcoach.app/ Mailcoach by Spatie (who work on a lot of really good Laravel open source stuff) seems decent at this. You can either pay for a self-hosted license, or use their cloud.
We use mailster with AWS SES and it works quite well. We have a lot of subscribers but don't send a lot of e-mails, so the cost of other solutions is ridiculous to me.
Affiliate-driven reviews introduce a major bias into the author's opinion, as they have incentive to speak more positively about platforms that are likely to pay the most.
And email marketing platforms pay a lot in affiliate fees. Just scanning some of the recommendations, if someone signs up for MailerLite through this reviewer's link, they'll pay the reviewer 30% of that subscriber's fees forever.[0] I wouldn't be surprised if the reviewer's top pick is coincidentally the platform with the highest-paying affiliate program.
The thing that really woke me up to affiliate-influenced reviews was the 2017 article, "The War To Sell You A Mattress Is An Internet Nightmare."[1] The reporter figured out that top YouTube mattress reviewers just gave positive reviews to whichever company paid the most in affiliate fees, and when one company lowered their fees, the reviewers retroactively downranked them for contrived reasons.
[0] https://www.mailerlite.com/affiliate
[1] https://www.fastcompany.com/3065928/sleepopolis-casper-blogg...
That being said: besides running a startup (Atlist.com) I also run an affiliate site (it’s how we funded Atlist) and I would agree there is good reason to read affiliate websites skeptically. I regularly receive offers from website builders to “buy” the top spot in my best website builder roundup. https://www.sitebuilderreport.com/best-website-builder
Ohhhh and on this step we eliminated all the companies that don't have an affiliate program.. hmm but we'll say it's because they don't have feature x....
This seems an actual interesting product.
I think arguments by people making these choices would be very educational to me (as a person with a bit of a scatterd brain).
- A company I worked for wanted to be 100% focused on doing one thing. It was spending 10x more than it was making revenue. It went bankrupt.
- Another company I worked for always insisted on not having all eggs in one basket. There was one big revenue maker that dwarfed the others though. The company is still around and doing well.
I have quite a scattered brain too so I get the appeal of "choosing to focus". But looking others do it I see the risks : refusing to experiment and learn new stuff, or find new opportunities.
EDIT: I'd like to add that focusing or not focusing is not a useful dichotomy, it's more about finding the right "exploration vs exploitation" balance.
Should we police the bandwidth of every founder?
https://x.com/cb_doge/status/1858177342436233511
The listicle tried to paint every other company making money as a scourge and the op as the only good guy trying to find the best deal for users when ophas the most corrupt incentives since those incentives are not even documented in a bloody helpdesk article somewhere.
That’s not even true! Loops is in “the best” and if doesnt have an affiliate link.
All “the rest” have affiliate programs too… I was just lazy to sign up for them.
Not everything is a conspiracy. The reality in this case is more mundane.
As much as people hated the display advertising common on the old internet, I'd actually argue this is far worse.
Instead of clear delineation between what's an ad and what's content, combining the two together just creates even more sinister incentives. Even the most good-hearted, honest and trustworthy "creators" can't escape those incentives over time. I've seen so many of my favorite creators head down that path I just expect it at this point.
Even the formerly trustworthy Wirecutter has lost its reliability post-NYT acquisition, clearly favoring products that offer affiliate payouts.
Does the content of my article seem dishonest?
I agree affiliate content should be read skeptically but you also have to be realistic: why would anyone go to all this work if not for some financial incentive?
Especially when you underscore the incentive issues with your closing question: if the only reason you can imagine going to the effort of a substantial review is financial incentive, that in itself is a pretty good criticism.
I’m suggesting a more productive argument would criticize the substance of my article — not my incentives.
Now, I'm gonna criticize you for a) not understanding the point up thread and b) taking the general comment too personally.
One is a good person. One is a bad person.
BOTH people are distorted by the wrong incentives.
It is NOT a question of being pedantic. They're literally not criticizing you when they criticize your incentives. I think this critique is from a board with relatively high percentage of systems-type thinkers.
Your evaluation criteria was downright silly (1), you didn’t actually try most of these tools, and your “top pick” has the highest affiliate payout (and longest affiliate window) on the list.
In fact, I have no idea how this article hasn’t been flagged since low quality affiliate listicles generally don’t make the front page here.
(1) Strict pricing models and not supporting web fonts like Inter are features, not bugs. Cheap platforms have crap quality shared IPs and 70%+ of inboxes (including most Gmail/outlook clients) don’t support web fonts at all. You’re designing something nobody will see correctly: https://www.caniemail.com/features/css-at-font-face/
I don’t want an email marking tool that:
• Charged overage fees • Uses dark patterns to charge me more
People die for altruistic causes. I don't think its unheard of for people to run websites for fun or fame.
If not, then you also would not put in a bunch of work on anything simply for fun or fame
We recommend software products too but don't hide behind euphemisms and hide our commissions.
I think we will be all happy with just that.
And, it’s the law im Canada: https://competition-bureau.canada.ca/deceptive-marketing-pra...
>My work is supported by affiliate commissions. Learn More
OP does disclose this more clearly than 95% of other sites, most of whom omit the notice entirely or bury it after the article content.
Naming affiliated businesses also seem to be part of that Canadian law.
Do we know if that is the case?
Draw your own conclusions.
That’s not even true! Loops is in “the best” and if doesnt have an affiliate link.
All “the rest” have affiliate programs too… I was just lazy to sign up for them.
Not everything is a conspiracy. The reality in this case is more mundane.
And it’s not as simple as cross-checking their public affiliate offers because these types of companies are always offering higher, private payouts (in exchange for editorial control).
Show us the numbers.
The degree to which your emails actually reach people’s inbox is the most important thing BY FAR and there is considerable variability between platforms on this metric.
I also find Mailchimp’s pricing and dark patterns extremely frustrating but it also has the best deliverability of any platform I have tried by a mile, which can’t just be hand-waved away.
What would you compare the tools on? Be specific
The article is just “why we chose breva” and is very specific to you. As far as I can tell you didnt even use half of the offerings since they were ruled out purely due to pricing models.
EDIT: just an example. If I wanted to know about sendgrid and how it compares, the only information this page gives me is “it has an overage charge”. How am I supposed to consume this article as an informative comparison?
I tried every gym in the world, but I can only pick those in my local area due to location concerns. So of the six gyms in my area...
You didn’t even read the article!
With bigger and more expensive email providers like Mailchimp, you're ultimately paying for higher deliverability.
For startups just getting going with waiting list signups and newsletters, there are a few basic rules to staying out of the spam folder and Promotions tab.
1. Make sure SPF, DKIM and DMARC are setup properly
2. Always "warm up" a new domain and outbound email address
Double opt-in where people have to either reply (highest signal) or click to confirm their email address tremendously helps warm up email. It's also important to slowly ramp up send volume over a few weeks or months and then keep send volume relatively consistent.
3. Consider using a warm up service that auto sends to and replies from an existing pool of recipient email addresses. It can help land your emails in the Primary inbox.
4. Watch out for shared IP addresses that end up on blacklists. If newsletters and emails are important to your biz growth, it's worth getting a dedicated IP address. Just be sure to warm it up properly.
5. Watch out for spam trigger words. Crypto, supplements, etc. It's an ever evolving list of words and phrases that bump up spam scores. Tools like https://www.mail-tester.com/ are useful for checking email config and spam scores.
The moment I say "double opt in", marketing will decide I lack the skills to be involved in mail and deliverability will be placed in the hands of someone with a graphics design background that has never heard of dns.
I've seen it in every single place I've tried to help marketing campaigns for over 20 years.
You want engaged customers/contacts. The right message to the right customer at the right time to sell whatever you are selling. The worse you do this, the worse the delivery reputation, the less you land in the inbox.
These other decision makers know they don't personally want nor respond to spam. They have to realize that their customers feel the same.
I know it's in widespread use through the online marketing sphere, but I really dislike that phrase.
If I give you an email address, until it has been confirmed - by means of you sending me an email which I have to confirm I've received by whatever means - it's not "opted-in" by any sane definition.
Will be looking to do this for a new side project that I have going on and this helps to know what to look out for
How about never. Is never good for you?
After trying a few also we ended up with EmailOctopus because of simplicity (we only send plain text emails) and cost. The trick was using their Connect [1] plans so it could send via our AWS account, which is cheaper (we pay $30/mo for the 10,0000 subscriber plan).
I also tried Loops and wanted to love it since they're perfect for SaaS companies, but back when I tried them we just got a ton of spam subscribers since they didn't have any built-in mitigation, so our list (and cost) grew.
But that was in their very early days, so I assume they've resolved it by now and I'd like to try them again at some point since they're much more modern and purpose-built for SaaS (and a YC company).
[1] https://help.emailoctopus.com/article/161-what-is-emailoctop...
(I originally considered it “not automated” because it wasn’t on by default but that’s a bit harsh in hindsight. )
What about email deliverability?
Deliverability refers to the percentage of emails you send that actually make it into your contacts' inboxes.
The tool you choose can impact deliverability. However, it’s a complex topic, and I won’t dive into the details here. If this is something you’re concerned about, there are experts far more knowledgeable than me who can explain it thoroughly.
This ought to be disclaimed at the top instead of the end.
… unless you’re a spammer haha.
Deliverability is the single most important thing to reach individuals in the first place, even more critical to maintain the transactional or workflow email relationship.
Anthropic right now has an issue where their "passwordless" emails go to junk for M365 customers (85% of SMBs in U.S.), people literally can't use the service since the email isn't delivered to the inbox.
To your point, in a past gig helping thousands of businesses with turning contacts into not just buyers but fans, I discovered mass marketers don't really care about deliverability at the level of "every single communication must land with every person".
At the same time, I learned customers you want to build a relationship with very much do care. Ever since, when evaluating these, I start there, even before price. How many communications, transactions, or workflows with a future buyer with intent are you willing to fail to connect?
"You had one job" means the primary, not only, dimension. Yes, the primary job of a mailer is for the mail to get there.
I agree there's lots more to look for as well!
These mailers all have different levels of trust and deliverability stats. It's critical to know.
You are of course correct that neither GMail nor Microsoft 365 or Hotmail or whatever they call it this week is suitable for any serious use.
Never had any issues with deliverability or receiving and been using it for years in a business context.
Emphasizing this. Validation emails sent to Microsoft hosted email are at high risk of never arriving.
For at least 2 years I've seen this on MS's free, paid and enterprise/hosted services. The issue is per validator; mails all arrive or none ever will. Generally I'll try again months later and find that service is still blocked.
I tried different cards, addresses, even a VPN. Nothing works. After googling a bit I found on Reddit that this is very common. I don't thinks their investors are happy with them not accepting customers.
I am building an Open Source email marketing platform (https://www.keila.io) and our current pricing model only considers the amount of emails you send, not the number of contacts/subscribers.
I've been thinking about switching to charging per contacts instead – and I probably wouldn't have considered not including unsubscribed contacts if they're still stored on the platform. But now I will, thanks!
I was so focused on deliverability with Mailchimp that I didn’t realize (until I just checked) that I’ve been paying for 2,000 unsubscribers. I had assumed I wasn’t. Deleting them would have moved me down a tier. Strongly considering MailerLite now.
Presumably it would also have lost your record of the fact that they'd already asked to not get your email. So you'd have added them back to the spam list if they ever dealt with you again, so they'd have to unsubscribe again.
Spam has gotten so normalized that not only are people not even pretending to get opt-ins, but they don't see why they should have to pay any real attention to opt-outs.
Yes, you are a spammer, and so are most of the businesses on the Internet at this point.
- An API to sign up to the list - A welcome email automation
That’s all. And I pay like $700 annually for that. When they sent me an email the other day of all of the features my plan has - none (not one!) applied to what I actually use it for! I don’t need ecom functions, a website builder, AI, none of that. I’m frustrated that there doesn’t seem to be a product for me.
https://playbooks.hypergrowthpartners.com/p/picking-your-lif...
I wrote this up about a year ago for a more comprehensive perspective for companies series A+
This post seems less about “trying every email marketing tool” to actually just being about “what’s the cheapest tool”.
When we wanted to improve our marketing automation, I decided to try Klaviyo because many people online recommended it. I spent around 500 euros and 3-4 days to integrate it with my custom ecommerce platform. After sending 2 campaigns, the open rate dropped to 15%. Later I discovered Klaviyo put us on a shared IP with not-so-good senders, so my emails were going to spam folder.
This made me think - how difficult would it be to build some of Klaviyo's features myself? Especially because I was already collecting customer behavior data like item views and checkout steps.
I spent 5 days building a custom solution with:
- Simple drag-and-drop email builder - Dynamic coupon generation with dynamic criterias - Template variables - SQL-based segmentation (<-- priceless!) - Automated flows (abandoned carts, welcome series, etc..) -SMS integration
I connected everything to Postmark and used their webhooks for analytics (opens, clicks, spam). Now I have a good in-house email marketing system that costs only $20 per month on Postmark, and my open rates are back to normal, as the profits too.
Sometimes the "simple" (hah) solution is the best one.
Anyways, I'm surprised to not see them mentioned or considered at all. Did they fly under the radar or do I just have the wrong impression of them?
[1] https://www.postmarkapp.com
I've been using Postmark for hobby projects for the past three years, and I've been happy with them, but my needs are super minimal - just sending out <100 emails per month programmatically where latency doesn't matter.
Back then they were rather convenient and we didn't have any problems with tainted IP addresses, not sure if their new rather villainous owner has changed the Postmark business. I kind of expect them to pull IP addresses in through the email sending business to build reputation and then promote them to the ad delivery business.
"5. Scammy Email Tactics Then there’s their sneaky signup process. When creating an account, there’s a checkbox that reads: “By NOT checking this box, I agree to receive promotional emails.""
trust me, I was working with Brevo for 4 years!
Just spam..
I ran away from Mailchimp more than 5 years ago when they started with their shenanigans and arrived at the same conclusion: Mailerlite is great. I used to have lots of respect for Mailchimp for being a bootstrapped business and never taking investor money but once they sold their soul, it was game over. One thing the article doesn't mention is the fact that Mailchimp has been moving from an email marketing SaaS to a marketing platform SaaS. From a quick glance at their services, they now offer a website builder, a CRM, ads retargeting, social media integrations---and as a customer, you end up paying for every single feature, regardless of if you want it or not.
It's commonly known and used in the agency and marketing world. Search for "go high level" on YouTube. Every marketer I know switched from ClickFunnels (reviewed in article) to High Level. It uses Mailgun on the backend for email delivery or can connect directly to SMTP.
If you need a CRM with AI features, calendars, newsletters, funnels, etc. then High Level is worth considering. I've been using it for a couple years and love it. For startups, it's a cheaper alternative to HubSpot.
https://gohighlevel.com/
For additional context, I've switched all my businesses and clients out of Mailchimp and Klaviyo to High Level.
For those using HighLevel, they're usually saving up to use HubSpot for their clients as an agency or freelance marketer - as I did. HighLevel is just a budgetary HubSpot.
Are these websites doing something other than a pretty UI for AWS SES for non technical folks?
I'm leaning towards using AWS SES and Mautic for automation. Mautic is open source and can replace these overpriced UIs.
Even for smaller shops, would recommend checking out some of the big players (eg Adobe, Salesforce Marketing Cloud, Eloqua, Twilio, etc) as they have entry level lower tiers that may end up costing less over time than some of these startup focused solutions (which all seem to nickel and dime you and hit you up with various types of overage charges), and will get you much higher deliverability, automation, and integration capabilities.
First month, we were debited 3500EU for opted-out profiles that they had auto-pulled, against the consent of customers and us.
Even with the CEO looped in on emails, we had to threaten chargebacks before they refunded.
They also refused to remove data under our official GDPR request.
In my honest opinion, it really does not matter which one you use. Aside from the feature and price differences, I consider them to be small details.
What you want to focus on is providing valuable education in each email, and being consistent. An Educational Email Course is a great example of this.
So they support a bunch of things, but personally I would not use it for anything except simple marketing campaigns. We do use it for that, but someone had the idea of having all customer emails go through it, and I don't really like it.
Email is expensive on purpose to incent customers into following good practices. Otherwise you attract all the worst customers (“let’s email everybody who’s ever interacted with us for a decade, regardless of if they want our emails!”). Then Gmail starts putting all emails sent on the cheap platforms IPs to spam by default.
Based on your practices, it sounds like these pricing models are doing their job of correctly scaring you away.
Is there a reference for best email practices you recommend?
Gmail's algorithm has really tightened up this year. Open your spam folder right now and you'll probably see more than a few legit businesses in there.
Basically if your engagement (opens, clicks, unsubscribes, complaints, etc as a percentage of total sends) is poor enough, Gmail will dump you in spam by default. They don't just "trust" that you have permission to email the people you're emailing. So many businesses abuse this, and they're incentivized to keep your inbox clean so you keep visiting your inbox (and click those Gmail ads!).
If you're getting low/declining engagement over time the algo just assumes you have poor sending practices, which to be honest, if that's happening, you probably do.
So the word deliverability includes making it past spam filters?
Then your domain reputation will be good because Gmail/outlook’s algo will see good numbers coming from your domain. Then the only thing you have to worry about is your IP rep (which comes from the platform you’re using — basically “are you sending from a platform that has high standards for customers and zealously guards their IPs”).
You can spend $thousands on consultants and what they’ll tell you will basically just boil down to that.
Sneaky, I almost trusted this til I reached the comments that this just another pretty looking affiliate spam
Btw you look like Finnish actor Pekka Strang.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G-Ir9WuI8-8
It's like you gave 1000 monkeys access to stack overflow with two buttons - one to copy and one to paste, then you trained an LLM on the garbage they produce, and then you asked the same monkeys to write a prompt for the LLM to write an email campaign manager...
Seriously Sendy is without a doubt the worst piece of software I've ever had the displeasure of reading the source code, ever. It makes Wordpress look like a well architected marvel of software engineering.
Sendy takes the hyperbole about junior developers copy and pasting code they don't understand to whole new levels.
Going to get downvoted for this - but I don’t know how spam is just considered OK and normal. We’re all bombarded with garbage every day. Managing my inbox is more annoying than ever. Just stop it already.
You need to promote things in some form in almost all cases.
https://mailster.co/