For what it's worth, I use Sendy to do all of my mailing list emails. Since I'm already paying my $6/month for web hosting, the only incremental cost is the ~$60 for the Sendy software, which was a lot more appealing to me than spending $50/month with the other options I investigated.
The process of setting up was tricky. I consider myself fairly technical for a lay person, but both times I've done a Sendy installation I had to email Ben (the creator of Sendy) at least once in order to get it working. If I was doing it for the first time, I would probably just pay Ben the extra $70 and have him install it for me.
My emails are just plain text with a few pictures interspersed in the email, but it has an option to code stuff in HTML, so I expect you could send out pretty emails if that was a key point for you. At some point I'll probably hire someone to pretty up my emails as well.
My mailing list just passed 8k subscribers (built mostly from people signing up so they can get the second book in one of my series for free), and the only problem I've had with Sendy so far is that I can't get the A/B testing on PopUpDomination to work. The lightbox works just fine (on a 25 second delay so people have to have spent some time on the site before they see it, and it only pops up once every 30 days) as long as I leave the A/B functionality off. Honestly the problem may not even be on Sendy's end of things there.
I email my list once every month or two, so in the last year alone only having to pay $1 per 10,000 emails sent has saved me a significant (for me) amount of money.