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Comment by matt_wulfeck | Hacker News Reader

$50 for 8 templates. There's nothing free or open-source on this site. Nothing wrong with that but just setting expectations. I supposed it's not a bad price if you're making money off the marketing campaign.

Can someone point to a "free", basic template that I can use instead of sending plaintext emails? HTML in emails is simply a PITA. If I can make my daily crons looks pretty then I'm all for that.

Even a nice css table similar to bootstrap would solve 99% of all my needs.

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Hey Matt, Lee here the creator of the templates. I've open sourced a simple basic email here (https://github.com/leemunroe/responsive-html-email-template) and also my Grunt workflow for building emails (https://github.com/leemunroe/grunt-email-workflow) if you'd like to take it for a spin.

Thank you for sharing your workflow. I am sure you will definitely find your customers, since website is enticing and well-designed.

Agreed, these are very expensive if all they are is responsive email templates. ThemeForest offers similar quality for about $12, and there are lots of free ones available as well:

Zurb - http://foundation.zurb.com/emails.html

Mailgun - http://blog.mailgun.com/transactional-html-email-templates/

Creating a moderately complex layout for Zurb is possible, but the HTML + inlined CSS ends up so large that it gets clipped in gmail.

Email design is hard. It's a bit like designing a website that still has to support IE5 on Windows 3.1.

Having worked in email marketing before, making a reliable template that just works in most major webmail platforms requires a LOT more work than doing the same thing for web browsers. If they work (and I haven't tried them, so can't provide first-hand evidence), then they are well worth the money.

Having to do email marketing as one of my job responsibilities, making something that both looks good and works is certainly not a trivial task that can be done on short notice just before you have to send the newsletter out.

If you want responsive, these are my go-to solution:

http://tedgoas.github.io/Cerberus/

Doesn't Facebook essentially use plaintext for emails? Personally, I don't see much reason to go beyond that.

Facebook uses basic HTML for a few of their emails (essentially anything requiring an image).

If you work in ecommerce, images can drastically increase response rates. They really are worth a thousand words.

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