I was paying Kit almost $200/mo to store 17K contacts I barely email

So by the start of this year my Kit bill was almost $200 a month.

I have 17K+ contacts on one of my products Legendsverse. But I don't send that much. A newsletter maybe once a month, sometimes once every two months. When I’m lucky, I get 35% opens, which is fine. But tbh, most of that list is cold as ice. Half of them haven't opened anything in ages.

I was just sitting there paying $200 a month to store contacts on a DB. So I decided to move my newsletters to SES. from $200 to $3. Way, way cheaper.

Then I remembered I have sequences. A welcome one, an upgrade reminder with a coupon, and a thank you one that asks for a testimonial. So just sending newsletters with SES wasn’t going to cut it. I had to build sequences, had to act on unsubscribes, complaints, opens, clicks, not as easy as I thought it would be. So just using SES kind of fell apart

So I started building a bigger thing to handle all of it. Sequences, newsletters, unsubs, complaints, opens, clicks, automations.

I’ve been building it since January and using it on Legendsverse the whole time. Lots of stuff to fix and figure out along the way, but it's been working really well.

It’s not as easy to set up, because after all, you need SES, plus a few DNS records to track opens and clicks, and a different one to handle unsubs/complaints in your own domain, to not pollute your reputation with my app’s domain. But once it's running, it just works.

Anyway. Since January I've sent over 130K emails with it and spent $13.

I even have a case study on Legendsverse with the volume and open rates and all that.

I'm not trying to sell anything here, just yet. I really just want to know if any of you are facing the same problems.

So if you've got thousands of contacts and you're paying Kit / Mailchimp / ActiveCampaign hundreds a month.

How much are you paying, and how often do you actually send?

And have you ever tried to leave? What stopped you?