How I Built an Open-Source Serverless Newsletter Platform

With Revue shutting down later this month, I had to find another option for my newsletters. So I built one.

This is the last week before the newsletter service Revue shuts down.

It’s the service I’ve been using for the past 7 months to publish my newsletter. It worked decently well, had some nice features that shared the weekly summary with me, and it integrated directly with Twitter so people could sign up from my profile. Best of all, it was free!

But on January 18th, it goes away. So I had to come up with another option for publishing my newsletter. I don’t want to have an interruption in service for all my lovely readers, that’s not fair to you.

I did some digging on newsletter services like MailChimp, Sendinblue, and ConvertKit, and they would work except I wasn’t looking to start paying a premium. Most of the newsletter services I looked into supported up to 300 readers on their free tier — and I’m fortunate enough to have more than that subscribed to the Serverless Picks of the Week newsletter.

I’ve had a full career as a software engineer and some would say I know my way around serverless development so I decided to write my own newsletter platform. Serverless services are inexpensive, they scale automatically to meet demand, and are one of the fastest ways to build software.

I also recently finished an automation that cross-posts my blogs that I could use as a foundation to trigger newsletter publishing. Seemed like a no-brainer to me!

If you want a tl;dr — you can skip straight to the open source repo and get started.

Finding An Email Engine

The first problem I had to solve in order to build a custom newsletter application is sending of the actual email. There are plenty of libraries that send emails, but in the spirit of assemble vs build I wanted to use a managed service.

Sending emails that don’t go to spam is difficult and requires expertise and ongoing maintenance — something I do not have. So I explored two options: Amazon SES and SendGrid. There are others out there, but I had the most familiarity…