Subscription for newsletter

[garbas]

Hi from the marketing team!

We are currently working on reviving a NixOS newsletter (what was previously called weekly.nixos.org). But it is going to be called newsletter and we are going to be posting once a month.

We are using mailchimp. A "problem" (a good problem to have) is that we are not starting from scratch since we already have ~2400 subscribers in the newsletter. Since we are over 2000 subscribers we need to upgrade.

Pricing from what I can see it for next (they call it "Essentials") tier is:

• 1501-2500 subscribers => $40/month
• 2501-5000 subscribers => $69/month

If we launch the newsletter I'm sure we will quickly reach the 2500 subscribers.

Can we get the funds to support this idea moving forward.

Thank you, Danke, Grazias, Dziekuje, Hvala, ...

[refroni]

Thanks for bringing this up Rok! Are there other alternatives that we should look into as well? Or do we want to move forward with Mailchimp?

[garbas]

I've looked at the following newsletter options:

• Mailchimp -> $69/month
• Moosend -> $48/month
• Drip -> $89/month
• Zoho campains -> $34/month
• Mailerlite -> $32/month
• Sendinblue -> $25/month

Above pricing is for up to 5000 subscribers (except Sendinblue is for unlimited subscribers).

I'd go with either Mailerlite (because it is easy to use) or with Sendinblue since it is the cheapest (and not bound to subscribers but to 20k emails per month).

[zimbatm]

We also have OpenCollective as a free communication platform. But maybe we want to keep it to post foundation-related updates only?

[refroni]

@garbas you prefer them over mailchimp? They are more economical so that's a +

[refroni]

I'll also take a look at what OpenCollective offers as I'm less familiar with their comms platform.

[garbas]

I don't think OpenCollective provides newsletter support (maybe this was a bit unclear from the title) since it is geared more towards being a legal and financial toolbox for "collectives" and not really to manage newsletters.

I think best value for the money would be Sendinblue from the above selection.

[garbas]

I've opened the account with Sendinblue, to give it a try.

[refroni]

Sounds good!

[nixos-discourse]

This issue has been mentioned on NixOS Discourse. There might be relevant details there:

https://discourse.nixos.org/t/2023-03-29-marketing-team-minutes/26836/1

[garbas]

@refroni Was there any update on getting the funds for this?

We'll be using Sendinblue and the cost is 19EUR/month ($25/month). We would need some credit card details to add to the account.

[JulienMalka]

Hello, Why are we not considering a self-hosted, NixOS enabled solution like listmonk ?

[garbas]

Hello, Why are we not considering a self-hosted, NixOS enabled solution like listmonk ?

Time constrains, I'd rather focus on the content than the tooling.

[JulienMalka]

Time constrains, I'd rather focus on the content than the tooling.

I think it would be a good thing that the foundation chose self-hosted solutions when possible. There is a data sovereignty argument and also some kind of marketing argument : why is the NixOS foundation not using stuff made by the Nix community ? If timing is an issue I am offering to deploy a listmonk instance on my own infrastructure for the foundation to try for free for 2 months and to discuss hosting fees that would be about on par with the other solutions listed here afterwards.

[garbas]

Time constrains, I'd rather focus on the content than the tooling.

I think it would be a good thing that the foundation chose self-hosted solutions when possible. There is a data sovereignty argument and also some kind of marketing argument : why is the NixOS foundation not using stuff made by the Nix community ?

I'd say setup a company, provide service support and provide competitive pricing. If you offer this to community for free (like FlyingCircus is with discourse and Bonsai is with Elasticsearch) we'll even mention this on the website.

As long as data can be exported and is handled with care in regards to privacy I don't see a problem with subscribing to any service. Using Nix/NixOS is not a criteria, but rather can we work and achieve goals faster.

But it would be a validation to all of us if we would be seeing more and more companies using Nix/NixOS and providing services at a competitive if not better pricing.

[RaitoBezarius]

While I am the packager and maintainer of listmonk and I very much agree with @JulienMalka ; I know that sending emails can be a daunting and difficult task, I would also appreciate if the Foundation could aim for reusing our own stuff, but that's probably a political stance thing (wrt to email hosting, etc.).

I would definitely join the effort of providing free maintenance to the Foundation to try such a tooling, the only thing I find it really important beyond data sovereignty (because listmonk can be used with Mailchimp, etc.) is: newsletters subscriptions are annoyingly bad at sending emails while respecting everyone.

There is a telemetry subject hidden in this discussion, adopting such a proprietary tooling means accepting the telemetry provided by those companies and I am okay with telemetry from the Foundation, but I would be sad to have telemetry from $randomcompany which the Foundation cannot really control. This is true for many subscriptions that can be used, of course, there's a strike balancing between ease of use and complexity wrt to infra, etc. And I very much agree that I prefer the marketing team working on marketing content rather than marketing infrastructure.

Nevertheless, stuff like Listmonk gets right (and enable you to get right) honoring GDPR and data rights in a very transparent way, even if we end up using AWS for sending emails (which is the canonical thing to do for marketing emails in general).

That's why, I'm in favor of this but I would not push for it, this can be provided by our non-profit (DGNum) or through our cooperative we are part of.

Listmonk obviously can export stuff, it's just a PostgreSQL under the hood :P.

[thufschmitt]

@garbas in light of https://discourse.nixos.org/t/community-teams-budget/40307, do you want to transfer the sendinblue account to the foundation?

[garbas]

@thufschmitt sorry for late answer. Yes I'd love to move the account to the foundation. What would be the first step?

[Janik-Haag]

Since we now officially have a non-critical infra team moving the mailing list to a self hosted solution seems a lot more realistic. I wanted to look into self hosting the foundation emails in general anyways, so working on this might be a good less critical start.

@garbas what do you think?

cc @zimbatm since I already talked with you about selfhosting the foundation emails cc @JulienMalka since you are currently the only official member of the non-critical infra team afaik

[garbas]

@Janik-Haag What sort of self-hosted service do you have in mind? A mailing list wouldn't be enough.

[Janik-Haag]

Something like a mailing list management tool (e.g. listmonk). Initially I also thought about self-hosting the actual mailserver (e.g. simple-nixos-mailserver/) but after talking about it a bit more in the infra channel we came to the conclusion that it would be preferable use a paid hosting provider for actually sending the mail since they will handle things like blocklists.

[thufschmitt]

Regardless, let's start with taking the bill out of Rok's hands. @edolstra, can you pair with him to move the payment to the Foundation? (I probably have the accesses, but I'm not sure how to go about that).

If you get any bill before that happens, feel free to expense it @garbas