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Comment by matchagaucho | Hacker News Reader

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matchagaucho

"One downside of using Sendy is that you have to setup / host it yourself. "

This is the classic mistake of calculating savings purely on costs and not factoring in time.

Pay $75 per month for hosting and 0 hours on Ops.

-or-

Pay $5 per month for hosting and 5 hours on Ops.

The latter option values your time at $15 per hour. Basically just creating a minimum wage job for yourself.

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We put Sendy on a server that we already have in use and have spent maybe 1 hour on admin work for it per year since. (Occasionally a new version comes out and you have to copy the files to the server). Plus if we had gone with Mailchimp, it's not like anyone is going to get paid 1 hour less.

you multiply that 75$ figure times 12 (you won't spend 5h/month on a firewalled webapps ops) and you are valuating your net (!) wage at about 100$/h (and from my experience standalone/not-internet connected "it works"-solutions have a half life well beyond any arbitrary fiscal horizon). While that might be in the range of a FB-SWE, for most "normal" private ventures the mailchimp "cloud"-offering just isn't gonna be worth it. Though one might argue, what is so private about a 10000 recipient "private" self-marketing campaign...

The other thing to think about is that with self-hosted applications -- of which I am a big proponent -- typically any extra hours of maintenance work are usually going to hit when you least expect and/or want them to, id est during some kind of failure mode.

Or spend 2-5 hours a year on Ops, and suddenly it looks more attractive again. You get to decide where on the range your personal preference flips, where your available skills probably put you on it and choose accordingly.

> The latter option values your time at $15 per hour

Makes the classic mistake of assuming your time is worth anything. If nobody will pay you money for those 5 hours, you're just picking a random number to justify either spending money or not spending it. May as well say it's $200 or $2 million.

I mean, you could just as easily use a real reference for what it would cost.

You can either pay mailchimp, or you can pay your senior developer to set it up for $80/hr.

Because you can pay someone to do something for $80/hr does not mean your time is worth $80/hr.

Is it a one time thing or a weekly/monthly/yearly thing?

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