What is Sendy?

Sendy is a self hosted email newsletter application that lets you send trackable emails via Amazon Simple Email Service (SES). Complete with reports, subscriber and list management.

Sendy was born out of frustration of paying for expensive email campaign services. We send newsletters via Campaign Monitor for SUBERNOVA and MockVault. No doubt Campaign Monitor is a great email campaign service, the price goes up to hundreds of dollars just for one email campaign. As our subscriber base grows, the cost per campaign grows significantly high.

We really don’t ask for much, just a newsletter application that enables us to manage subscribers, send campaigns and view reports. What we managed to find were either too expensive or flat out ugly.

The best service we’ve found

The best service we’ve found is Amazon Simple Email Service (SES). It offers email sending at high deliverability rates and at an insanely low price. $1 (Amazon SES) versus $150 (Campaign Monitor) for 10,000 emails?? Sounds great! But they don’t offer the ability to send trackable newsletters and manage lists and subscribers.

Amazon SES is in need of an application that is built around it.

And so we built it. We even added client access features so that you can create logins for your clients to send newsletters on their own at a price you set.

You can have Sendy too at a one time introductory fee of $40 (we’ll be pricing it at $59 at some point).

Using Google Chrome? You can install SUBERNOVA as an app in Google Chrome!

Install SUBERNOVA from Chrome Web Store →

Previously, all emails sent on your behalf to your clients are sent using our server. As a result your email may be marked as spam when it lands on your client’s mailbox. Why? The receiving server usually checks if an email is forged by looking at the IP address of the server sending that email. If it is different from the IP address of your email, there is a chance that your email will get sent to the spam folder.

To prevent this, we now let you use your own SMTP outgoing mail server. If set up correctly, all future emails sent to your clients will be sent using SMTP. In another words, all emails will be sent directly from your own email service provider so that your emails will not end up in their spam folder.

Setting an SMTP outgoing mail server is not compulsory, but recommended if you want to be sure your emails will always land on their inbox. :)

How does this work?

We automatically append the letter t at the back of the link in the email sent to them. When your client clicks the link with the letter t appended at the back of the link, we know that your client has viewed your quote or invoice, so we subsequently send an email or Prowl notification to notify you.

If you’re sending the link in an email application (outside of SUBERNOVA) and you want the same click tracking to be enabled, just append the letter t to the back of your link.

Why the letter t? Just remember it stands for “track”. :)

We previously talked about our new app, MockVault. It’s now available immediately for signups!

What is MockVault?

MockVault lets you manage your designs and versions with ease at the backend and present them professionally to your clients at the frontend.

To get a design approved, it’s not all about the design, it’s how you sell it. When sending a design to your client over the web, different format yields different results. If you’ve been sending mockups in PDF, Powerpoint or even in multiple JPEGs, your designs may not look like how it should be when it’s coded. This results in unnecessary requests for changes, wasting you time.

For over 13 years, we’ve tried and tested several ways of presenting our designs to clients. Only one format deemed the most effective in terms of getting it approved. It’s by placing annotations over the mockups and displaying it like the actual website.

The reason why annotations raises approval rates is because it’s easy for them to understand what they’re looking at. Guiding your clients through is critical if you want them to see the design the way you see it.

It is difficult to guide your client through your design over the web. With MockVault, it’s easy.

Check out MockVault!

Throughout the 13 years of designing websites for clients, we noticed one thing. In terms of design approvals, presenting designs in different ways yields different results. The initial design stage can be a very draggy process, if you do not present your designs the right way, it can give you days or even weeks of headaches.

Presenting your design

We’ve experimented with many different ways:

1. Presenting the design in JPEGs over email with or without explanation
2. Zipping up the JPEGs and send over email, client views JPEG with their own image viewer (whatever it may be)
3. Embedding the design in PDF format
4. Embedding the design in Powerpoint format
5. Placing the designs in a centralized HTML layout with a repeated background, simulating the completed website
6. Placing designs in HTML with explanation write-ups in an overlay
7. Placing designs in HTML with explanation notes directly over JPEG image, labeled in sequence, eg. 1 – 10

Have you tried any of these? The list can go on. Except #7, most of the rest don’t work. If your client views your design in their image viewer, PDF or Powerpoint, the design will be scaled and may even be skewed in some cases. This causes confusion and misunderstanding when they view the completed website.

Getting your designs approved

Placing your design in HTML simulating the completed website seems to work well, but it does not give you a high approval rate – if you do not walk them through.

It is hard to make changes to a design if the site has been coded, at most times it is wise to have your client approve the design first before you proceed for coding. Most of us gets the green light verbally, or sometimes non at all! It all turns into a mind game, we wonder if we can “really” proceed for coding or continue wasting valuable time waiting for the client to say OK. Wouldn’t it be great if you can provide your client with an easy way to approve the design by clicking one button?

So what’s this all about?

We’re creating a new app to help you present your designs better and get a higher rate of approval. This app also lets you store all your designs and its versions in one place, making managing your designs a joy. We call it MockVault. Check out the site, signup, follow us and be amongst the first to know when it’s here!

Click +Create line items from project & milestone timers and all your timer data will be inserted as line items.

You can then edit these items as you see fit. If you use the timer a lot, this should make you much more efficient!

Being able to track time on milestones has been the most requested feature. Just like projects, you can now track time on milestones and tasks!

You can also edit the timer manually by launching the milestone editing window.

On the right side of the Timer fields, your total earnings will be displayed. This is a multiplication of your hourly rate by the total time spent on this milestone.

The project editing window went through some changes as well.

1. Project Timer: This remains unchanged. The project’s timer is independent of its milestone timers. If you’ve been using the project timer all these while, you can continue doing so without changing any habits.
2. Total Timed Amount: This amount is calculated by adding the project’s timer values to the total time tracked on all milestones.
3. Grand Total: This figure is based on the calculation of Amount (the amount displayed on the left of the modal window) + Total Timed Amount
4. Total time tracked on all milestones: This is the total time you’ve tracked on all milestones associated to this project

2. Adding Multiple Clients

Previously, if you add multiple clients of different contacts but with the same company’s name, there is no way to tell which is which when selecting a client from a drop down menu. We solved this problem by adding the person’s initials beside the company’s name.

3. Increased Legibility of White on Black Texts

We’ve adjusted all fonts for better readability when they are white on black, especially on form fields.

We hope this small adjustment provides you with a better reading experience.

That’s all for now, hope you enjoy this update!

It’s the new year, 2012, we hope you had a good start so far!

We’re writing this to let you know that our pricing will be going through some changes. We have been reviewing our pricing and the features we offer and realized that the price tag we put on this app doesn’t quite match up to the value it provides.

Almost all our competitors starts at a price much higher than ours, with limits. Whereas we offer project management + invoicing with no limits and at a much lower cost. We have no problems with that, but this low cost sometimes raises a red flag, it backfires and refrains some from even trying our app.

Hence after a long period of consideration, we’ve decided to increase the monthly fee by $5. The new monthly fee will be $19.99/month. If you upgrade to the annual subscription, it’ll be $199.99 (2 months free as usual).

This is still a low fee considering the number of useful features you can use to better run your business.

If you currently have an active subscription with us, don’t worry, your monthly or annual fee is locked in and will not change for as long as you stay with us.

If you’re currently on the free trial, you can lock in the old pricing just like our active customers by upgrading before January 17. This is the date where our new pricing will take effect for free trial users.

To recap, here’s what you’ll get for upgrading:

• Collaborate with team members or clients on projects, milestones, tasks and links
• Create and send unlimited invoices & estimates
• Automatic late payment reminders to your clients
• Recurring invoices
• Integrates invoices with PayPal payment gateway
• Receive Daily Report of impending project and milestone deadlines via email
• iPhone & iPad optimized web app / Push notifications via Prowl
• Scheduling emails to clients
• Time tracking
• Synchronization with your calendar of choice using iCalendar feeds
• RSS feed to keep track of team activities
• Supports creation of milestones, tasks and links via email
• Manage unlimited projects, clients, milestones, links and users
• Daily backups of your data to a secure remote location
• Data security with SSL encryption