Making an Open Source [REDACTED] alternative in a week.

I am working on a form solution for developers and marketing teams to share, and I needed it to start sending emails. I looked into options and found that lots of developers who use front-end frameworks like Next and SvelteKit end up using email services like [REDACTED].

It makes sense, they have a nice free tier and it is really easy to set up. If you are looking for the absolute easiest way to ship some app sending emails, they are the clear choice.

Maybe that isn't what drives all your decisions though. Maybe you don't always look for the easiest way to do something.

Maybe you want to do something that will be cheap as you grow so you don't end up on Serverless Horrors.

I am starting to become skeptical of these free-tiers and done for you services, and I think other people are too.

This is not a dig explicitly at [REDACTED], again, if you want the easiest thing they are a great option.

Most of these are AWS wrappers up charging you for a nicer more useable interface. Which is awesome, and a great service to provide, but it's one I am sick of paying for.

Stop spending money on things we could build for each other.

I pay for this service in more ways than one, first you clearly might just leave the free tier and start paying, but second when clients need things built I often point them to the services I use.

This is something these companies count on.

Here is the kicker though. They charge my clients a lot more than they ever charge any of my projects.

Like way fucking more.

Thousands per month and sometimes way more than that even.

That is crazy... I want that money.

Frankly, that should be my money.

Developers have all the ability to host and scale their clients infrastructure relatively easy nowadays, and these thin wrappers around AWS, or some other rented infrastructure are raking in money that could easily go to you. Which would result in your client now having a developer on retainer personally ensuring their infrastructure is good sometimes for a fraction of the price.

Be the email/charts/s3/video expert.

You might be able to support yourself by simply ensuring high deliverability by wrapping AWS SES. Some people might try to convince you this is rocket science but it isn't. We have normalized wrappers so deep that you can even choose at what level you want to insert your service.

Putting a product on Digital Ocean that wraps AWS SES is a few good libraries away. Use Tinybird for analytics if you need something crazy. Poof you are [REDACTED]. You can make even more if you drop some of those other proper nouns, but maybe you don't care to build your own Clickhouse thing and would rather pay for that.

Or maybe that sounds like the exact thing you want to spend time perfecting and your should go build your own Clickhouse wrapper and tell some of the big clients you have worked with or will work with in the future that you provide that as a service.

Go wild with your charts nerd.

Some of you have seen the bills behind the scenes when a big company uses a wrapper of a wrapper of a wrapper as a service.

Sometimes the juice is worth the squeeze.

Sometimes it would make more sense to refer them to "This one person I know does email monitoring software, and they can give us x hours on retainer for $X,XXX per month they partnered with a deliverability expert".

Sometimes you don't need to refer them at all because that person is you.

Sometimes that number is $XX,XXX.

"Oh isn't that less than what we calculated [REDACTED] would charge?" the client might ask.

I felt fairly confident I could figure out how to run my own version of [REDACTED] in a way that would service my current needs, and then improve it until it could fulfill my client needs, and then recommend that over some third party service.

So I did that, and it took about a week to make something I could start using, which actually had lots of bugs resulting in the sending function being less useful than the SNS monitoring feature, and those bugs took about a week to sort out.

Now two weeks later my form startup is sending and monitoring emails via my open sourced host it yourself email project called Double-Zero

It still has a lot of work left to be anywhere near equivalent in features, and I think the email queue for sending could have a lot of improvements. It is still not in a place where I would put clients on it, but it will be soon.

Here is the cool thing about it being open source. You can learn about SES and SNS and then do this for your customers too. You could be the email person raking in money during this bullshit economy and not some VC funded [REDACTED].

Just make sure you want to dive deep into Emails, learn the ins and outs of SES and SNS and be able to deliver what your clients need from you.

I have a theory though that it would be possible to offer more than one of these types of solutions, as long as you are replacing something high on the wrapper stack. Like I said, it's just SES and SNS. From there you need to just scale to your users needs. I am currently testing my library for scalability, and its not exactly like anything I have built before, so I have some kinks to work out. But maybe you are already an expert in something like this and just got laid off from Google. Make your own, open source it, put clients on it, teach others how to do this.

I plan on also adding a "Pro" version you can pay for that will come with more features such as teams and advanced analytics maybe built with my own Clickhouse wrapper.

If you buy a license for this pro version you will be able to turn a one time purchase into re-occurring revenue by putting your clients on it and hosting it using a service like Fly.io. This is high in the wrapper stack.

Yes, you will have to learn new things to do all this, and you should start by making sure you can do it properly for your own needs. But it isn't rocket science. As DHH said

"Everyone and their dog used to do it, and it has only gotten easier." - DHH