This is the story of how I saved £1440 a year. By reading this, you might also be able to save yourself some money every year.

My blog itself costs about £350 a year, but my newsletter costs me £948 a year.

Soon I'll hit the 8,000 mark. My email list will then cost £120! £1440 per year!

At £120 a month on ConvertKit, it just didn't make sense.

The most costly part of my blog wasn't the blog itself, but instead an email list I maintained. How is this right? And here's the kicker - the more subscribers I get, the more exponentially expensive it grows. Even if I wasn't sending emails!

My blog itself costs 17% of my total yearly spending. My email list costs 77%. This just doesn't make sense. Why am I spending so much money on my email list, but none on my blog?

So I set about finding an alternative. I went through many free trials. Mailerlite, Mailchimp, Email Octopus. All of them grew with how many subscribers I had.

The bigger my subscriber list became, the more expensive it became to communicate to them. I was seriously considering just storing a plain CSV file and using Gmail to send emails. But then, I discovered Sendy.

Sendy

Sendy's website starts with:

Your subscriber base is growing and so is the cost per campaign. Going for the monthly plan means wasting more money if you don't send newsletters regularly enough.

You're stuck. The bigger your subscriber base becomes, the more expensive it is to communicate with them. What if you can send without worrying about cost or deliverability?

Which was exactly my problem. I was scared to grow my list because doing so would mean more money spent.

Sendy uses Amazon's SES to send emails. $0.10 per 1000 emails. If I send 10,000 emails a month, that's £1! £1 instead of £120.

While researching competitors, I often read "you're not paying to maintain the list, you're paying for the deliverability". This is not a problem with Sendy. It uses Amazon SES which means Amazon handles the deliverability problems.

Sendy has a nice interface like Convertkit, but it is exponentially cheaper. You pay once for Sendy at $59, and then you pay for the Amazon SES fees which as we saw are just $0.10 per 1000 emails. Already in the first month, Sendy is half the price of ConvertKit.
Even with 50,000 subscribers, Sendy costs £20 and ConvertKit costs £379 per month.

What are the downsides?

What most people talk about is the deliverability aspect, which doesn't apply at all since Sendy uses Amazon's SES. However, you still have other downsides.

The setup

To install Sendy, you need to create a server, set Sendy up on it (which takes about 2 hours for someone familiar with sysadmin). Then apply to Amazon SES and some other things. All outlined on the website

I'm not familiar with sysadmin work. It took me around 16 hours, it was my first time doing this okay 😅

Luckily there are companies such as Sendybay who do all of the work for you for the low price of $3.99 a month. Or you can pay the Sendy creator $79 to install it for you.

Landing page who?

Sendy does not have any landing pages, or pop-ups, or anything. It's all entirely built around the sending email aspect (which, it is very good at).

It has 1 incredibly blank landing page:

Sendy has an incredibly intuitive API. I'm not good with API's and even I understood it within seconds.

It's possible to build your landing pages in HTML or CSS or w/e and use the Sendy API to add subscribers.

But, I'm lazy. I don't want to spend hours working on landing pages, especially when I know nothing about web dev. So I signed up for Leadpages (£25 per month) to solve that issue.

This still makes it cheaper than Convertkit.

You can connect Leadpages to Sendy using Zapier, but if you use Zapier the number of subscribers that come from landing pages increases the cost of Zapier exponentially. The same problem we had earlier.

To get around this, leadpages lets us write custom HTML right into the landing page. I simply inspect element the form, copied it and changed the form's POST and ta-da! We have Sendy integrated directly with Leadpages without the worry of paying more and more for every new subscriber we get.

Did I mention Leadpages entire business is around making good landing pages, so naturally they are very good at their jobs. Just look at how amazing this landing page for my latest book is!

Templates

Sendy has no templates. Which isn't a problem for me, as I'm a large advocate for plain text emails. Check out this post for more on why fancy email templates aren't the answer.

Conclusion

With a little bit of knowledge about programming, it's possible to reduce my email list from £1440 a year to £12 a year. Without worrying about having too many subscribers!

ps: no affiliate links here. But if you want to sign up to my email list, please do so.