I'm not defending MailChimp (this devtools thing is pretty awful) but "just DIY it" is a bit glib. DIY'ing what MailChimp provides is... a lot.
I wrote a sort of "DIY MailChimp" for a marketer back in the ancient days of the early 2000s. I did the tracking and email content bits.
I did not handle the email servers themselves. Lot of work staying off of blacklists. It was something close to a fulltime job back then, and from what folks have told me it might be more like multiple fulltime jobs these days. Lots of anti-spam regulations to adhere to, and one or two false steps and you're going to wind up in an absolute hell where other email providers (Yahoo, Gmail, whoever) are not going to talk to your servers.
Also need to figure out email templates that render consistently across webmail providers and browsers and mail clients. That is also a loooot.
Making a consumer-friendly UI like Mailchimp is another massive task, but I guess you can skip that for your "DIY" solution.
Again, I'm not defending Mailchimp. I hope I never have to dip my toes into this area again. It is hell.
The users of mailchimp don't need to make another mailchimp. They just need to handle their own email needs. That's a big difference. It's still not easy, and I would never be glib about it, especially since I've never run my own mail server on my own domain name before.
But...several full-time jobs? How much mail do you need to send before postfix on a $5 VPS falls over? In terms of composing html mail that looks good, that would take some time to learn. A day to get something passable, especially with LLM help? As for tracking, I am against image/pixel tracking in emails, I think it undermines trust, so I wouldn't implement it (or use it).
I think it depends on how important delivery is to your business. If your business team expects near 100% delivery and they want all the tracking features that give them insight into their promotional campaigns, then running email promotions on your own is quite a steep hill to climb.
I run my own MTA on my own domain and only use it for verification purposes and I still have to fight with the free email providers every few weeks. It's definitely not a full-time job but I also have the joy of just not caring if a user doesn't get an email from my system.
A agree with you somewhat that people reach for mass mail services too quickly sometimes but I also understand the perspective of engineers who have things like deadlines and other work to do where if I have the choice of working on truly new things to help grow the business I work for or handling email logistics, I know where I will point the my company.
It's not the amount of mail you send. Sending 1,000,000 emails is as easy as sending 1,000.
As I said though compliance with spam regulations will be a constant battle. If you don't care if e.g. Google blacklists you from gmail.com, cool. That makes things a lot easier.
The users of mailchimp don't need to make another mailchimp
Right. I said that I'm assuming you can skip the consumer-friendly UI bits.
However, I'm assuming you do at least want the analytic and tracking bits in this theoretical situation. Otherwise, why use something like Mailchimp in the first place? There are other ways to "just send mail." You choose Mailchimp for the extra bits.
I wrote a sort of "DIY MailChimp" for a marketer back in the ancient days of the early 2000s. I did the tracking and email content bits.
I did not handle the email servers themselves. Lot of work staying off of blacklists. It was something close to a fulltime job back then, and from what folks have told me it might be more like multiple fulltime jobs these days. Lots of anti-spam regulations to adhere to, and one or two false steps and you're going to wind up in an absolute hell where other email providers (Yahoo, Gmail, whoever) are not going to talk to your servers.
Also need to figure out email templates that render consistently across webmail providers and browsers and mail clients. That is also a loooot.
Making a consumer-friendly UI like Mailchimp is another massive task, but I guess you can skip that for your "DIY" solution.
Again, I'm not defending Mailchimp. I hope I never have to dip my toes into this area again. It is hell.