[Zababa]

Not eveyone earns 100€ an hour, especially in Europe. The newsletter has a French name ("Le courrier du Hacker"), and in France 45/50k€ a year is a good salary. That's around 14/15€ an hour. Which means ~33 hours a year of maintenance.

[tstrimple]

There are many ways to measure the cost of something like this, but a blind look at average salaries is probably the worst. It doesn't factor in overhead or opportunity cost. In most companies, having a developer spend a week on maintenance of a system which isn't a core business value doesn't make sense. They would be much better utilized on value added work. I guarantee you most engineers could delivery way more than $500 in savings in a week.

[Zababa]

As I said here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27259123 this isn't a company, it's a newsletter so more of something like a side project. I don't think you could deliver more than 500€ of savings in a week because the email costs were the main costs. I agree with you than within a company this would be different, but this isn't a company.

[tashoecraft]

My comment was targeted to the person I replied to, which I interpreted as "managers only think in terms of time saved where as developers if merely left alone would roll it their own and save time and money", which is ridiculous. An engineer should think like their manager, and the manager should think like the engineer. A cost/benefit should be realized, and I think for the high majority of companies, you should not be rolling your own to save 500/year.

A newsletter is so different because merely this blogpost could have generated enough money/attention to warrant doing it, but there's an endless amount of reasoning that can be done to warrant both choices.

[maddyboo]

The cost to the company per engineer hour is significantly higher than the engineer’s hourly rate.

[Zababa]

But this isn't a company, it's a newletter the author is running. It's important to consider the context of things. Here the only cost is opportunity cost, which I wouldn't know how to evaluate. On the other hand, they save 500€ a year, learned new skills and created content for their blog.

[nixgeek]

I think it is actually closer to ~16 hours a year assuming the lower end of the range you suggested, and dramatically less if this person makes more than that.

Most simply, I think the typical calculation is if there were 40 working hours per week (8 hours, Mon - Fri) then there are 2080 working hours per year, which is ~21.63 Euro (per hour, assuming 45k EUR) just in salary - other commenters pointed out an employer would have other costs, but lets try and keep it simple as was suggested.

But beyond simple, you don't work on public holidays and Europe tends to have 20-25 vacation days per year as well. That probably adds up to 35 days (280 hours) in France. Therefore the number of hours actually 'at work' is only going to be 1800 a year, so 45k EUR comes to 25EUR per hour.

I imagine this might work on AWS Free Tier but while SES supports ~62k emails per month as 'Always Free', any EC2 instance or network bandwidth is probably billable here. There's probably up to 100EUR a year in cost associated here?

So you have 400EUR of money Mailchimp charged for the service and will never be "apples to apples" because now you're responsible for initial setup and ongoing maintenance. Definitely seems simple in the blog post, but unmentioned was how you backup all the configuration and state, how do you monitor it, most of the features of Mailtrain (e.g. Click Stats) rely on the NodeJS application being operational so is this actually a load balancer, two instances, and the extra complexity of database replication, et al? It is also now on you to make sure it stays patched, isn't compromised, etc.

I imagine there are different deliverability promises with Mailchimp vs. Amazon SES and you might now have to do more managing of that through AWS interfaces?

All of the above needs to fit into ~16 hours a year if we're going to draw this comparison against what you'd make as a salaried engineer. All of the above is time that could have been spent on extra content for the newsletter, or improved content for it, other than this post obviously, or on audience building, on other professional development, or just about anything else.

I think the ROI of writing the article and making everyone debate this on the internet was pretty high, but the title feels like clickbait. This is a straight trade for saving a little money vs. a semi-significant personal time investment.

[Zababa]

Here are my calculations: a salary of 45k euros in France means you take home 2618€ a month (according to https://www.salaire-brut-en-net.fr/). A month is ~4.33 weeks, a week is 35 hours. 2618 / (35 * 4.33) gives me ~17.40, so I made a mistake with my initial calculation. Still, it's way less than your 25 euros per hour. Maybe you underestimate the difference between "brut" and "net" and then taxes, which are both pretty high in France.

500€ at 17.40€ an hour is 28.7 hours, 22.9 if we're taking your 400€ (I'll believe you on that, I don't know much about AWS pricing). I think that may be reasonable to take care of it. There's also a big problem: you can't directly transform hours of your life into money. If the author is not paid by the hour because he's a cadre, he had to work 218 days in the year, and that's it, working more hours won't make him directly earn more (more info here https://www.service-public.fr/particuliers/vosdroits/F19261?...). Finding freelance work to expand those 10 to 30 hours (to be very large) isn't going to be easy too. As an aside, if we take 218 days for our calculations, that comes up to ~20€ an hour if they work 8 hours days, and ~23€ an hour if they work 7 hours days.

I do agree that database replication seems like a big issue, and if that's the case maybe switching to RDS could be a good idea.

Anyway, I think the article is relatively good at demonstrating the two extremes, Mailchimp vs everything by hand. Everyone is free to take of that what they find interesting, even if it's "I'd rather pay for Mailchimp".

> I think the ROI of writing the article and making everyone debate this on the internet was pretty high, but the title feels like clickbait. This is a straight trade for saving a little money vs. a semi-significant personal time investment.

I do think that it should be "How I" instead of "How to", but on the other hand "save up x/year" already informs you that the author is trading their time for money. I don't think it's clickbait just because it wouldn't apply to your or other peoples situations. Especially if 500€ is a little money for you, you're not really the target of the article.