10 / Measure
Sometimes a cost looks inevitable simply because nobody has stopped to look at it again.
A package includes services that nobody uses.
Only a small part of a platform is actually needed.
The same feature appears in two suppliers’ packages. It is paid for twice, without really being used through either.
A cost can make perfect sense on its own and become unnecessary when you look at the system as a whole.
Before looking for a lower price, I try to understand what we are buying.
And why.
With newsletters, the issue was more than the cost of Mailchimp.
It was also how recipients were organised.
Contacts were not managed as a properly structured, single database. A new recipient list tended to be uploaded for each newsletter.
The same person could end up in the system several times.
A more useful structure would have looked different.
One contact → multiple attributes → mailing segments.
Lists should have been derived from contact properties, rather than becoming a new starting point each time.
For years, that way of organising the work could not really be changed.
On the Mailchimp plan in use, contact-based pricing made this inefficiency particularly expensive.
AcyMailing proved a better fit for that situation, partly because its pricing model was better suited to the way the service was actually being used.
That does not make it a better platform in every situation.
It may offer fewer features. But many of Mailchimp’s additional capabilities were not being used in this case.
Changing platforms does not, by itself, solve the way data is organised.
The migration made it possible to choose a tool better proportioned to actual use. How to organise the contacts remains a separate question.
Optimising a cost means more than finding the same thing for less. It means understanding what we use, what we pay for and whether the two match.