Picoletter is a newsletter app for independent bloggers and writers. It uses Resend APIs to send emails. With their really generous free tier, you could run your newsletter on a $5 VM on DigitalOcean or Hetzner virtually for free.
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This is beta software, you can use it in production if you're feeling like going on a adventure, meanwhile here are the list of things that work and things that are pending
- Run multiple newsletter from the same app
- Subscription, confirmation & unsubscription flow
- Schedule newsletter for sending
- Custom sending domains
- Handle bounces and complains to ensure good reputation
- Embeddable forms for subscription
- Public archive
- Better rate limiting for embed forms
- Subscriber import & export
- Subscriber reminders
- Subscriber labels and cohorts
- Ruby on Rails
- PostgreSQl
- SolidQueue
- Resend
The backend is written in Rails with PostgreSQL as the DB. SolidQueue is used to run background jobs.
We use Resend for emails, plain old SMTP won't work here, since we need to send emails in bulk. Comparing most providers available, Resend struck the balance perfectly in terms of simplicity and pricing. For most users hosting this on their own, their free tier should suffice. At the moment there's no plans to add support for any other provider
Deployment will be done with slick-deploy and kamal-deploy as an alternative option.
A lot of work is pending in this department, I am building slick-deploy along with this app, so it might be slow.