Quillrush: newsletters from posts, sent via Sendy

Email newsletters are one of the few channels you can actually own, yet most tools push you onto a hosted service that charges by the subscriber and holds your list. Quillrush is my way to keep the ownership and cut the cost, using WordPress content and self-hosted sending.

The problem

Two things bother me about the usual newsletter setup.

First, cost. Hosted services price per subscriber, so success is punished: the bigger your list, the more you pay, often steeply. Second, control. Your subscriber list, the asset, lives on someone else's platform, and moving it is deliberately awkward.

Meanwhile, you are already publishing content in WordPress. Rebuilding it inside a separate email tool is duplicated work.

The approach

Quillrush closes both gaps by connecting what you already have.

• Build from your posts. Turn WordPress posts into a responsive HTML newsletter, so your published content becomes the email without a separate rebuild.
• Send through self-hosted Sendy on Amazon SES. Sendy manages the list and campaigns; SES does the actual sending at a tiny per-email cost. You own the list and pay pennies to reach it.

What shipped

Quillrush builds responsive HTML newsletters from WordPress posts and sends them via self-hosted Sendy and Amazon SES. You keep your subscriber list on your own infrastructure, send to it cheaply, and turn content you already wrote into the newsletter instead of rebuilding it elsewhere.

What I learned building it

The fiddly part was not the sending; it was the HTML. Email clients are a compatibility minefield, far worse than browsers, and a huge share of readers are on phones. Generating email that renders correctly across that mess, responsively, is most of the real engineering. The lesson was an old one: the boring compatibility work is exactly where the value hides, because it is what everyone else skips.

Quillrush is one of my WordPress plugins. The full set is in the products section of the site.