notifuse

Notifuse is a newsletter and transactional email platform that deliberately does not send email. It connects to Amazon SES, Mailgun, Postmark, Mailjet, SparkPost, SendGrid, or plain SMTP, and owns everything above that layer: a visual MJML template builder, contact lists with custom fields, segmentation, A/B tests, automation flows with delays and branching, a transactional API, and open and click analytics.

Go and Postgres, deployed with Docker Compose. Because delivery is delegated, you skip the entire mail server problem that makes self-hosted email miserable, and you inherit whatever sending reputation your provider has already built.

Self-hosting is free under AGPL with every feature included, which the project states plainly rather than burying. Cloud starts at $19 a month, or $16 billed annually, for 2,500 active contacts, and climbs through $49, $129, and $319 a month at fifty thousand contacts. Self-host against Amazon SES at roughly ten cents per thousand emails and that same fifty thousand contact list costs a few dollars a month rather than a few hundred.

The catch is that you now operate two things: this, and an account with a sending provider that can still suspend you over a bad list. Notifuse hands you the marketing layer, not permission to email people who never asked for it.