Which email service to use?

Hey, that's a great question! There is an entire spectrum of things you can try, from the simplest to the most complex, but in the spirit of IH, let's roll with something dead simple:

1. Setup a free MailChimp account
2. Create a template and a list in MailChimp
3. Use Integromat to add new customers to this list when Stripe charges are created.
4. Setup MailChimp to send an email with the template you created when a subscriber is added to the list.

Links:

• mailchimp.com/help/create-an-automated-welcome-email/
• integromat.com/en/integration/1991-add-new-stripe-customers-to-mailchimp

If your needs are a bit more sophisticated, ping me here. We can expand 🤓

So there are a few things to consider. In your situation I believe to most difficult and important choice is to determine how you are going to connect the code to your email templates.

You can roll something you made yourself, or you can use a 3rd party service such as SendGrid or MailChimp to handle that for you. I can't really share experience about how good the integration can possibly be with a 3rd party service. From my own experience I can tell a self rolled solution will definitely impose a bigger workload, but the end result will be completely tailored to your needs.

If you're looking for something which is almost free (besides hosting fees), host your own mail server, point your DNS MX records to it, and start working. A good start would be https://github.com/tomav/docker-mailserver, but would require some general knowledge on various topics such as email, docker, reverse proxies and networking in general. The downside to this approach is that you will need to supply the logic to send emails yourself which, again, could impose a serious workload.

To answerk your 2nd question; I rolled my own and I'm quite happy with it. While it took quite a lot of effort, I was able to create something which absolutely fits my situation. I even published a library which abstracts away the templating issues: https://github.com/skyhop/mail

Buy a decent domain, then get on Fiverr and have BulkEmail set up a MailWizz server for you. You can get hosting VPS for cheap too. I pay $6.70 (a month) for two different email servers I use via MailWizz.

I can get you the VPS name if you are interested in going this route. It's super simple. BulkEmail delivers you the email server ready to use out of the box. Just take care to stay off BlackLists, and observe good email practices. For what you need it for, you could easily have your own email server for less than ~$4 a month.

Postmark is the best!

For hosting a static site use https://www.netlify.com/ a lot easier than s3 if you plan on coding it yourself.

Might also want to look at https://gumroad.com/ for selling source code.