“I can’t leave Substack, the alternatives charge monthly fees!”

[usul@piaille.fr]

@molly0xfff wouldnt self hosting email bé cheaper?

[notplants@sunbeam.city]

@molly0xfff when you say you self-host ghost and 70% of your cost is for bulk email, do you mean that you use another paid external service for e-mail sending? and if so, id be curious which one

ty for these stats, this is very interesting

personally, im not at all up for the personal task of trying to self-host an email server and stay out of spam folders, so curious what you are using for bulk email sending.

[aeva@mastodon.gamedev.place]

@molly0xfff fascinating. do you have an estimate on how many subscribers typically read newsletter posts?

[molly0xfff@hachyderm.io]

@eleventy ️

[molly0xfff@hachyderm.io]

@usul bulk email sending is a nightmare i would wish upon no one. sending is easy, delivering is hard.

[sashin@veganism.social]

@molly0xfff What do you use to send emails? Button down?

[molly0xfff@hachyderm.io]

@notplants Mailgun, which is what Ghost requires. I hope at some point they’ll add connectors for other providers.

[molly0xfff@hachyderm.io]

@aeva nope, i don’t use any tracking

[molly0xfff@hachyderm.io]

@sashin I self-host Ghost, which sends emails via Mailgun

[kenny113@infosec.exchange]

@molly0xfff @usul from a tech stack perspective, distribution sure would be a lot easier if authenticated RSS was a thing (besides clear text feed tokens). Any other solutions on the horizon?

[methylcobalamin@mastodon.social]

@molly0xfff The well known liberal and progressive names on substack can afford it. They don't want to lose readers who may not bother following them to their new platform.

[rochelimit@tilde.zone]

@molly0xfff
I've just subscribed to your RSS feed. How many people use that instead of the email newsletter subscriptions, so on top of the 25,000?

[molly0xfff@hachyderm.io]

@rochelimit no idea! that’s one of the great things about RSS, it’s much less trackable

[molly0xfff@hachyderm.io]

@Methylcobalamin moving away from Substack is pretty much seamless on the subscriber end

[molly0xfff@hachyderm.io]

For those who aren’t a fan of my 20,000 number, here’s a breakdown:

(edited to fix an error in self-hosted ghost for 50k subs)

[docpop@mastodon.social]

@molly0xfff thanks for sharing these details.

[kharrison@twit.social]

@molly0xfff Isn’t ConvertKit only free up to 1,000? Pricing similar to mailchimp.

[methylcobalamin@mastodon.social]

@molly0xfff Not matter how easy it is, I think a lot of people just wouldn't bother.

[molly0xfff@hachyderm.io]

@Methylcobalamin it’s not a question of whether they’d bother, there’s no effort required by the subscriber

[molly0xfff@hachyderm.io]

@kharrison no, it’s 10k now