I left Mailchimp and Google Analytics. Here’s the bill.

Building in public isn’t posting your wins on X.

It’s showing the real numbers, ugly ones included, so people can check your work.

That’s hard to do when your numbers live in someone else’s dashboard. Mine did: my subscribers were in Mailchimp, my traffic in Google Analytics.

Then two tweets in October got me to take them back. Here’s what happened, and the bill.

Tweet one. Marc Lou left beehiiv after its third price rise in two years, then released the platform he built instead as open source: MailCheap. Mailchimp charges per contact too, so I took his code and made it mine.

Newsletters: Mailchimp → self-hosted MailCheap

• Before: $13/month on Mailchimp

• After: about 10 cents/month on Amazon SES ($0.10 per 1,000 emails), unlimited contacts

• To build it: ~$191 of Claude Code tokens at API prices (10 sessions, 1,645 tool calls)

• Time to swap the hosting, database and queue: a few hours

The full newsletter story

Tweet two. Two weeks later, DataBull a self-hosted copy of DataFast (a paid analytics tool) got half a million views. The replies pointed me to tools I could host myself, so I moved my websites off Google Analytics too. My pick: InsightFlare

Analytics: Google Analytics → InsightFlare, self-hosted on Cloudflare

• Websites moved: 9

• Time: 1 hour

• Claude Code: 1 session, $3.53 at API prices

• Cookies: 0

The full analytics story

My bill for all of it now: close to $0.

The bad numbers

Both moves burned ~$194 of Claude tokens at API prices. I don’t pay that directly: I’m on a $200 Ultra subscription that I use across all my projects, and this was a tiny part of it. Still, saving $13 a month won’t change my life, so money alone isn’t the reason.

So why do it?

Ownership. The list and the stats sit in databases I control. I can export them, change the code, or show them to you.

Trust. You gave your email to me, not to a marketing platform. If you ask where it lives, I can now answer: in my own database on Google Cloud, with emails sent from my own domain through Amazon SES.

I still see opens and clicks on this email, but they stay in that database. And visits to my 9 websites no longer go through Google Analytics.

That’s what building in public means to me: nothing important sits where I can’t see it or show it to you.

Try this today: export your list, open the file, and ask yourself whether you could tell a reader where their data lives.

Which number should I share next? Reply and tell me.

Rent the plumbing. Own what runs through it.

Keep grinding,

Julien

P.S. This email went out through all of this. If it landed in spam, I can no longer blame Mailchimp 😅