mushufasa
Born on January 08, 2018•4108 Karma
I looked for this in the past. This is the main reason we bothered with mailchimp/hubspot -- simply the ability for nontechnical marketing people to put together nice emails, and the trust that we won't need an engineer to troubleshoot email formatting on their behalf. I remember trying some OSS tools at the time (8 years ago?) and there were some templates we used but then when we wanted to modify them, the broken-ness of email html/css standards made it really hard to test.
I know the standards and practice around this are a moving target, though, so I hope you can find a model to sustain and expand this, without charging for delivery/contact list numbers like MailChimp or other incumbents.
The cross-client rendering thing is why Templatical outputs MJML instead of raw HTML. MJML was built to abstract all the table-based, Outlook-2007-quirks, Gmail-strips-style nonsense — you write semantic blocks, MJML compiles to table HTML that works across every major email client. So when your marketing person moves a block or changes a button color, it doesn't silently break in Outlook two weeks later.
On sustainability — same concern. Even while I was building it, multiple times I caught myself asking "is this even worth theeffort? Maybe not with all the functionalities I've built, but someone could vibe-code a lightweight version of it in a day." But at the same time, I see and personally used SaaS products with the same or fewer features selling for $2,500/mo, which seems ridiculous.
I'm currently working on a subscription-based Cloud version, but only for things that actually need an infrastructure and backend: AI chat/rewrite, image-to-template conversion, MCP integration, hosted media gallery, saved modules, commenting, real-time collab, email testing, version history, etc. Sending stays your own provider — no per-contact, per-email, or per-delivery charges.
Also, yes! Microsoft should kill Outlook with fire! :)
ALL of that goes through cpanel, for every shared hosting provider I can ever remember using. Even if the stuff happening on those servers didn't use perl, cpanel itself -- the admin of everything provided for that domain by the hosting provider -- it's a huge surface area.
You could shuck the disk and use it directly, though. Then it's just a disk, not a time capsule.
In scenarios where the company REALLY REALLY wants to buy the SaaS, they often will invest in the company, one of the reasons for which being to ensure they have the resources to go through all the red tape.
That’s how deep we are in neoliberal single truth shit now
Then, the benefit of saving 1-2% extra versus spending my time trying to actually running the business and doing things with our money in the real world, has meant I have never looked back. 1-2% on millions of dollars is significant but it's not nearly as impactful as finding Product-Market-Fit in your actual business.
All this to say: I'd be in your target market but I'm simply not interested in a "marginally better" treasury system versus just going with my bank's options that make it easy for me.
That's why we designed Palus to be as simple as possible to use. If you check out our demo video, you'll see it's super straightforward. Setup takes <5 min and then you don't have to think about it anymore. We're also building out automatic sweep functionality, so then you REALLY won't have to think about it.
Given the significant increase in returns on a large treasury, we think it's worth the small amount of effort.
Isn't that the point he was making though? It's a large treasury in aggregate, which is why it makes sense for a new entrant to come in, but it's only a 1-2% problem for founders, which is why they don't bother with it much (why fix what's not broken, etc.).
By the time founders raise significant sums of money (which is usually Series B onwards), they might be better suited to deal with a fractional CFO service which provides the full spectrum of services instead.
And it'll get even easier once we add our auto-sweep features in the next few weeks, and you'll be able to just set it up once and truly never have to touch it again.
We certainly don't claim that Palus will transform your startup. But it's a worthwhile piece of very low-hanging fruit.
You've got really significant, broader lesson here for startups at this stage.
Even for a Series A company, putting $5M into Palus should yield an extra $50k-75k per year, just for having your money sit in a smarter place. Put another way, it should cover six months of a junior engineer's salary for free.
For five minutes of setup, we think most founders will find it worthwhile.