I'm not minimizing the amount of effort it takes to curate links, but does a mailing list need to constantly grow for it to be viable ? What does it mean to "operate at a loss" in this case ?
My first guess is ESP pricing. Just to pull numbers out of thin air to anchor the conversation, mailing to 20,000 subscribers costs $200–$400/mo at Mailchimp/ConvertKit/Klaviyo, three of the top choices in the space. If it's 50,000 subscribers, that's $380–$800/mo.
These are email marketing platforms, not bulk transaction email platforms, and I don't see why they can't do with the latter. At a bulk transaction platform, such a tiny amount would cost at most $20-$50/mo. If you're willing to do a bit of work to use AWS SES, that would be $2-$5 a month. Azure ACS would be even cheaper.
Just playing devils advocate, but why not just switch to posting on a free hosted blog platform? The information can be there for all to see, it doesnt need to be distributed directly into mailboxes by premium mailer services.
You could just notify the user to add you to their contact list. Like :
Emails will be sent from feed@example.com. If you're not seeing any email, please check your spam inbox and add this address to your contact list,...[rest of notice].
Anyone have any recommendations that aren't run by Cooper? All of the suggestions so far are run by the same person and while I don't have anything against them personally, a bit of diversity wouldn't hurt :)
Unfortunately we've had endless waves of botnets attempting to subscribe thousands of fake email addresses to us over the years, and while our IP reputation system helps keep this at bay, it's also catching quite a lot of legitimate users now thanks to the prevalance of VPNs. So we'll need to come up with a new approach. (And no, even Cloudflare Turnstile isn't enough to keep them away, sadly, as there are plenty of human-backed adversarial networks too trying to make scam Gmail addresses look legit by subscribing them to newsletters.)
However, we do subscribe many people manually, and we also have RSS - http://javascriptweekly.com/rss - so you don't have to deal with email at all if you don't want to. There are also numerous other options out there, which I've linked in a sibling comment.
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