Introduction

So maybe you’re wondering what those promises of ‘free’ mass mailing services really entail, or maybe you just want to save yourself some time. I hope I can provide a small relieve, and maybe save you some time and frustration.

In spirit of our demo-app we wanted to see if there were any ‘free’ mass mailing tools out there, that would provide a decent enough mailing service that could be useable even in the ‘free’ tier that several of these services offer. All of the tested services advertise with a free tier.

With generally quite reasonable features in terms of contacts, analytics and composers. In this comprehensive review I’ll share some of our experiences without going into too much depth. Some of these providers seem very dodgy when it comes the ‘free’ tier of their service. And in several cases are effectively not useable.

Be forewarned ! Nothing is more frustrating than going through the motions of setting up your account, creating a campaign , only to find out your account has been mysteriously blocked due to ‘administrative reasons’.

Good luck trying to unblock it. It has a very ‘scammy’ vibe to it, especially considering these companies keep spamming you with (paid) offers long after they officially denounce you from their services. I was pretty shocked at the level of customer service some of these providers offer. Keep in mind, this is the free tier, and it’s quite possible none of the same things would happen if you entered a credit card.

But some caution might be advisable, once you sign up, it tends to default to a year membership (or more), they can block your outgoing campaigns, and then you get to spend your time on getting your money back, or your account unlocked.

For fairness we tested all providers with the same:

• Signup Email address (web email from either gmail or proton)
• Domain ( a real domain, or a social media profile, when indicated this was a possibility. ) Although not directly related to us.
• We created a campaign and test email with the provided creator tools.
• Send our campaign to test addresses including a gmail address to check for deliverability.
• As well as verified opened and clickthrough analytics.

Here's what we found

Mailjet

Attempts to use this service failed miserably.

After signing up to the free tier. Our account was partially disabled within minutes, with a message to contact support. Which we did. Support then came with a whole ream of additional questions from company mission to pages that stated our opt-in and privacy policy and then some. We provided all relevant details. Including details of our mission, e.g. to run a test of the service to check the quality etc. Unfortunately there was no time to include pages with privacy policy or opt-in policy.

After providing the relevant details, we got some weird reply(s) more or less stating the same questions over and over without responding to any of our counter questions etc. This leads me to believe the entire correspondence is most likely handled by a bot. (and one that could use some more attention at that). And regardless of how we stated the answers the service was never activated.

HARD PASS

I’d personally never enter a ccard number with an enterprise that utilizes these business practices. Also having to deal with simple AI bots while trying to solve your problem feels like a really bad idea. After all, once you pay; all time , and money, is on you.

MailerLite

Despite many hallelujah stories on the internet. Our evaluation suffered a similar fate as with Mailjet. But far later in the process. Everything seemed fine. We created a campaign, set everything up. And used the provided email creater tool to craft a decent looking newsletter.

The moment we clicked ‘send’ the trouble started. First the site stated the newsletter was going through ‘review ‘ , very shortly after that the account was partially deactivated with several re-activation questions posted that needed to filled out on the site. Which we did. Nothing. Email send to support. We got a very similar style reply as with Mailjet. More questions etc. After providing answers the same pattern emerged, the MailerLite side more or less re-iterated the same questions, while not responding to any of our answers. Again I suspect it was a simple email bot. And we were stuck in a loop which were unable to get out of.

And just like with mailjet, the verdict is :

HARD PASS

I can only imagine how many folks this happened to after they actually shelled out the cash only to find themselves arguing with a bot to get their account activated.

Cleverreach

This is a German mailing service, the only one of the bunch. That promises deliverability and all that good stuff.

In practice their ‘free’ tier suffers from the same disease as MailerLite. You sign up, configure and set everything up. All seems well. We entered company address data etc. As requested. And according to the site all was well.

After trying to send our newsletter, apparently somethings were not so well anymore. It was not entirely clear. We received an automated email stating more company info was needed. Which we entered on the site. As before, we never got to get the account to work, with our beautiful template sitting idle forever. Trying to contact support was futile, we never received a reply.

HARD PASS

As before, be wary with this group.

Intermezzo

Ok, breather. At this point we were getting mildly demoralized, would none of these ‘free’ tiers actually work ? Luckily the following options functioned as advertised. With some exceptional customer service in some cases to boot.

Tools that worked as advertised or better

Kit

Is a mail service for influencers / creators , or marketed as such. Not really our category, nevertheless they offer the most contacts to reach out to in their free tier. And generally has something of a ‘homegrown’ vibe. What can I say, I might have a modest sweet spot for the underdog framing, and their somewhat ‘unusual’ integration features. Which preferably works through ‘apps’. That the community can create for Kit users, adding features on top of the standard kit service. Which is a nice model if they can get it off the ground.

The service worked as advertised. I read the API spec, but didn’t make any trials, due to the necessity to build an OAuth flow for bulk procedures. And time is always short.

What I really liked:

• Customer service ! Wow, this deserves special mention. I had some issues with deliverability. (actually due to my own mistake in some settings). Contacted support, to my utter shock a real human (!) replied within the hour. I remember just staring at the screen in disbelief. He suggested some tweaks in the setting, which I made, and after some back and forth ( very quickly I might add) it was resolved. A couple days later I even got a follow up to check if all was still working as expected. Can’t believe it to this day. . . *Smaller companies take note. People can spot other people better then you think, no matter how charming you try to make your chatbot. Google the ‘Uncanny valley’ effect for good measure. I’d like to think the concept might apply to more than just visual ques. But hey that’s just me.
• Large amount of contacts and emails available in free tier.

What could be improved:

• Their upgraded API suite requires tokens that can only be acquired through OAuth2 flow. While yes, it’s the industry standard, it’d be nice for integration developers to have at least the option to utilize plain bearer tokens for authentication. The developing side can then decide on the required security features. Nevertheless most operations can be executed with their previous gen API.
• You will need the upgraded API’s to utilize bulk operations ,like adding contact lists.

Verdict

Great choice, especially if you need to send decent volumes from your free tier.

MailChimp

The Gorilla in the room. (pun, sort of) MailChimp is serious operation and it shows. Excellent UI, well thought out API connectivity. Basically every feature worked as expected, without fuzz. Lot’s of sample templates. Excellent FAQ’s and help pages. Features we tested all worked as advertised.

Improvement: The amount of contacts available in the free tier is rather modest. And the volume is also less then what we would hope for.

API integration through bearer token or OAuth2 flow, makes it a straightforward integration.

Verdict

Great choice, especially if you don’t have a very massive audience for your free tier. If you really like the Mailchimp features, something like this demo app could really help out, by renewing contacts after a campaign is run. Keeping total contact count to a minimum.

EmailOctopus

Ok, so the spongebob animations aside. I picked this service to utilize in the demo because of it’s straightforward interface. No-frills functional environment, and it also has this ‘homegrown’ vibe I have a soft spot for. Apparently of British / Polish origin. It has a lovely template editor, and reasonable volume settings in the free tier. Prices go up pretty fast if you want to increase your contact count.

I found the API interface and the datamodel I inferred from the object structure the most accessible, hence I chose the Octo for the demo app.

Likes:

• Accessible (read: simple) datamodel
• Straightforward no-frills API with Bearer Token.
• Decent template editor
• Purple octopus

Up for improvement

• Certain bulk operations (like adding contacts) are somewhat ‘uniquely’ implemented (basically consecutive one-off’s with rate limiter)
• Campaign metrics lack depth. ( no counter for the amounts of opens / clickthrough per contact etc)

Verdict

Excellent choice, especially if you are starting out

Now that that’s behind us, I hope I saved you some time, and possibly headache with your selection of free mass mail tools.

Let’s get started building our integrations !

PART II App architecture.

Note: If you’re a large entity, of have big volume needs, there are additional options like SendGrid , Twilio, as well as Amazon SES. These services were left out of this review, as it’s likely you’ll have other KPI’s and requirements then us mere mortals. And it seems a bit bend to compare something like Kit or Octo to Amazon. Mailchimp could be the missing link for anything in between ( sort of pun intended).