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Show HN: I made an open source Mailchimp RSS-to-Email alternative

by elliotkillick on 7/7/24, 3:26 PM with 37 comments

Hi all! Excited to share rss2newsletter after completing dev work for the initial release.

The idea for this project came out of necessity, as I wanted to share my articles via email newsletter. I was looking for a super minimal, lightweight, and open source solution, and when none existed, I decided to create one.

For any sizable number of email recipients, a popular platform like Mailchimp will easily cost you hundreds or even thousands per month in per-contact fees. rss2newsletter, on the other hand, allows you to use Amazon SES, so you can reach your audience at pennies on the dollar.

Beyond these factors, I also wanted something that could run on an internet-connected potato it's so easy on your system and fully automated so you can set it and forget it.

So, I created (and put under a free software license):

https://github.com/ElliotKillick/rss2newsletter

rss2newsletter (integrating with Listmonk and Amazon SES for ultra-low-cost emails) is a drop-in solution that requires almost no setup besides connecting with SES and styling your emails. It's also competitive at what it does with proprietary self-hosted solutions like Sendy, which requires your system/VPS to have some rather beefy specs to run well.

Let me know if there are any other features you would like to see. I hope you can find my project helpful to you!

  • by Beijinger on 7/8/24, 9:29 AM

    I prefer it the other way around: https://kill-the-newsletter.com/

  • by santa_boy on 7/8/24, 3:28 AM

    Perhaps a bit OT, but will really appreciate inputs on this.

    There have been an influx of such tools, and understandably so, related to email lists. Based on various comments, I feel that the biggest item driving success around email is around email deliverability.

    What are the the skills and secret sauce of companies that claim to do very reliable email deliverability, and I'm failing to understand why isn't it as simple as doing the right configurations and setting it up using Amazon SES.

    Any email gurus to please throw actionable light on this?

  • by browningstreet on 7/7/24, 6:03 PM

    I was surprised, coming back to newsletters, how many newsletter platforms don't support RSS-to-newsletter. I've hacked a work-around that I'm not happy with, but I look forward to digging into this.

  • by hardwaresofton on 7/7/24, 11:09 PM

    Listmonk is a seriously awesome piece of software!

    Have used it to run multiple newsletters, over various version upgrades (almost all stress free), and even written some custom integrations with the API.

    https://listmonk.app

  • by shortformblog on 7/8/24, 12:32 AM

    This is cool—happy to see more stuff like this. I like the idea of creating a private RSS feed with a CMS and having it ship out to a service like this automagically.

  • by CPLX on 7/7/24, 7:36 PM

    This is great and very happy to see it. Mailchimp is annoyingly expensive for what it is.

    With that said the sending of the emails is the easy part. Deliverability is hard.

    Sending via SES is pretty likely to go straight to spam folders or worse. Granted if it’s 100% opt-in and you have the kind of audience that will hunt for the email and mark it as valid you’ll probably improve and be ok long term but it’s something to think about.

  • by qudat on 7/7/24, 7:07 PM

    Very cool! We built something similar but is not self hosted: https://pico.sh/feeds

    How do you handle Reddit feeds? We found those to be tricky to get right because it seems like Reddit doesn’t want you to use rss

  • by pacifika on 7/7/24, 6:14 PM

    Just what I was looking for. Thanks!