Lately I have been perusing some Newsletter options and by the looks of it Newsletter services are similar to paying to send an SMS , which in my mind screams "Why can I not do it myself?"
By the looks of it Beehiiv has one of the better Free tiers, given I did not look too hard. Still I do recall from my habit of randomly perusing such things every couple of months the pricing from different places not being as giving as this.
However something else I note it the sharp jumps everyone always has when it comes to I assume a "profit" point for the user.
In the Beehiiv pricelist this is assumed to be anything above 2500 subscribers, then they do believe you aught to be making plenty of money to cough up $42.
It really is the same across the board, except that one I forget which is $5 no matter what so you just keep doubling or tripling... Which sounds as though it is for the small creator but frankly is just a stupid system of pricing.
Obviously I have never run a newsletter, it is hard enough for me to think of rubbish to post as it is but it seems odd to me that it is assumed a newsletter must be profitable at 2500 subscribers or even 10 000.
What if I really just want to update people on interesting facts exclusive to them, maybe 10 000 people do prefer to know more about my poop cycle for the week and have it in email so it is super easy to find, archive, read at leisure.
Sure the free tiers are frankly more than enough for the majority of people but unless I am selling laxatives or ultra soft coochy paper I won't be making a lot from my Newsletter so then it gets to the point where I do need to decide.
Which leads me to the self-hosted options.
Email in general is a tricky beast, if there is one thing you never want to end up doing yourself then that is to selfhost an email server. Unless you do enjoy soul crushing pain then have fun.
A Newsletter service for the most part seems to run a thin line right up against that. There are many things they do in the background that I didn't even know existed, which will always be the case I guess with such old protocols that seemingly just work.
They seemingly just work because there are years worth of infra supporting it so it is best to leave it alone and do what the manual says.
However it is not all doom and gloom when it comes to self-hosting your Newsletter, by the looks of it.
One that I will be testing is Listmonk, which I kinda think is one of the only ones with an active community.
It also has some of the most modern tooling since you can easily run a docker compose build etc etc.
But as with any of the Newsletter services it will come down to how the mail provider is setup. Why it can be well worth it to pay is because they have the infra, they have done all the DKIM, and PTR records and other weird shit.
So a selfhosted solution will only be as good at landing in someone's inbox as the security and verification measure your email provider has implemented.
After that then sure quality of life things like drag and drop and management tool whooza is nice.
All in all I think I want to test it anyway because for me it is more a case of being too lazy to change providers when I hit their free limit so maybe it is best to fail early and know if the money will be worth paying if I fail.