Boldermail is a WordPress plugin and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) platform. It allows small- and medium-sized businesses to manage their subscribers and deliver newsletters to them at the incredible rate of $0.0001 per email. How do we achieve this? Keep reading!
How It Works
Boldermail uses Sendy and Amazon Simple Email Services (Amazon SES) to reliably deliver email campaigns. Sendy is a self-hosted email newsletter engine, and Amazon SES is a part of the Amazon Web Services cloud. Amazon SES offers email delivery at a rate of $1 per 10,000 emails.
Let’s talk about how the three components: Boldermail, Sendy, and Amazon SES work together! The Boldermail WordPress Plugin provides a place for you to design and write newsletters. You’ll also use the plugin to tell the system exactly which mailing list(s) to send to!
Once you write your newsletter, you’ll tell Boldermail when to send it — now or at a scheduled time in the future. When Boldermail has that date and time, it relays a copy of the newsletter to Sendy, which makes multiple copies.
When Sendy has finished making all the copies, Boldermail facilitates all those copies making their way to Amazon SES. Amazon SES ensures that newsletter/blog post emails are delivered quickly, efficiently, and without landing in spam folders! Once all emails are delivered, you can use Boldermail to see exactly who the emails were delivered to, what the open rate was, and who has subscribed or unsubscribed from your mailing list.
Why Do You Need a Server?
Great question! Other WordPress plugins follow two alternative paths: Some plugins use your WordPress server (a.k.a. your website’s backend) to deliver the emails. Others utilize Amazon SES to deliver emails, but they have your WordPress server do all of the heavy lifting preparing the emails for delivery.
Why aren’t these alternative paths ideal? Well, the first option uses your WordPress server to set up batches of emails, to track open and click rates, to track which users subscribe to or unsubscribe from the newsletter, and to deliver the emails. Relying on the WordPress server to do this is a bad idea in general! Preparing and delivering emails quickly is an arduous task for a server, and your website visitors may experience slow loading times or errors when visiting your site. Furthermore, your hosting provider may put a limit on how many emails you can send per day or the speed at which your emails are sent. This may prevent your newsletter from being delivered correctly or even at all!
The second option uses your WordPress server to prepare the emails for delivery, but then uses Amazon SES to deliver the emails. This option is a bit better than the first one, but it has serious disadvantages! Since your server is doing a lot of work preparing your emails for delivery, you may end up using more computing power than you want, which will likely cause errors on your site. With your own separate Boldermail server, you don’t need to worry about all of this because the heavy lifting is done by us — not your WordPress website!
How are We Different?
Our first difference lies in the fact that we were our own first client. Boldermail was developed to meet our needs, and we loved it so much that we knew we had to make it available to others. You can find our story here!
The plugins that interact with Amazon SES do not offer *any* kind of support regarding the setup of Amazon SES. Unless you are a developer, setting up an Amazon Web Services account and then setting up Amazon SES can be an incredibly difficult task. We at Boldermail provide you with instructions and support on how to create an account on Amazon Web Services, and then we will set up Amazon SES for you for free!
Another way we make ourselves stand out is through our seamless integration with WordPress. You’ll always be able to access your opens, clicks, subscribes and unsubscribes! Basically, our plugin provides a user-friendly interface, and your Boldermail server does all the work to send out emails — not your website! This ensures that your newsletter is sent correctly, reliably, and at a significantly lower cost than the competition.
How Much Does Boldermail Cost?
Our WordPress plugin is free, and it will always be free. As we add features to it (better reporting, autoresponders, etc.), we make the pledge to always keep it free! What you pay for is your Boldermail web server — to connect your WordPress installation to Amazon SES via Sendy. We invite you to check out our plans here!
You can use the calculator below to estimate costs and compare your savings vs. the cost of the competition! At the moment, we do not offer a free plan, although we may consider implementing one in the future. If your number of subscribers is on the low end (500-1000), it may be a better fit to use another platform such as Mailchimp for now, and then migrate it to Boldermail in the future. We are happy to help you migrate your subscribers at no cost whenever you’re ready!
How many subscribers do you have?
How many email newsletters do you send per month (including blog post updates)?
Cost
| Boldermail | $0 / month | $0 / year |
| Mailchimp | $0 / month | $0 / year |
| Savings | $0 / month0% | $0 / year |
Great! Where do I sign-up?
You can click here to pick a plan. Once you complete the checkout process, please follow the steps outlined here to correctly setup your Boldermail server with Sendy and your Amazon SES account. Don’t worry — the process will not take you longer than 10 minutes. If you get stuck at any step, we’re happy to jump in and help you! Just shoot an email to [email protected]. It should take between 24-48 hours to set up your account and server. Then, you’ll be well on your way to sending emails reliably and in a cost-effective manner!