RXed AI News

The customer newsletter engine: own your mailing list without the per-subscriber bill

Email your customers every month for pocket change — and the list stays yours

A mailing list you own outright, on a box you own, for roughly the price of a coffee a month — no matter how many subscribers you have.

The problem

A customer visits once, likes what they got, and then forgets you exist. The cheapest fix known to commerce — a short email now and then — is exactly the thing that never happens, because the tools that make it easy charge per subscriber. Mailchimp's free plan now stops at 500 contacts; paid plans start around €12/month and climb to €55+ at 5,000 subscribers and €90+ at 10,000 (rates as of early 2026 — they change, but the shape doesn't: the better you do, the more you pay). So the newsletter gets postponed, or gets killed the first month cash is tight — which is precisely the month you need repeat business most. There's a second cost people notice too late: the list lives on the platform. Export is possible, but sign-up forms, templates and history don't move with you.

The architecture

Two pieces, deliberately separated. Listmonk owns the list: who's subscribed, sign-up forms, unsubscribes, the email editor, the send schedule. The SMTP service owns the delivery: it lends you its sender reputation so your emails land in inboxes instead of spam folders. This split is the design decision that makes the whole thing work — you never self-host the actual mail sending (that's a decade-long reputation game you can't win from a fresh server), and you never hand over the list itself (that's the asset). Either half can be swapped later without losing the other.

Tool choices — and why

Listmonk (AGPL-3.0, 21.8k stars, v6.1.0 released 03/2026, commits this week) is the whole product on the list side: a single small program plus a PostgreSQL database, with an official Docker setup that gets you to a login screen in minutes. It has the pieces that usually cost money: hosted sign-up pages you can link or QR-code straight to, double opt-in, a drag-and-drop email builder, segmentation, open/click tracking, and automatic bounce handling. It runs comfortably in ~50 MB of RAM, so it shares a box with whatever else you self-host. What it doesn't have: landing-page builders, A/B testing, e-commerce integrations. For "a good email to my customers once a month", none of those are missing.

Why not Mautic? It's the other open-source name in this space and it's genuinely more powerful — full marketing automation, lead scoring, campaign builders. It's also a much heavier thing to run and maintain. If the job is a newsletter, Mautic is a truck to fetch bread. Start with Listmonk; you can graduate later, the subscriber CSV moves with you.

The sending service is a choice between two good defaults. Brevo (EU company, processes data under EU law) has a free tier of 300 emails/day — a 1,000-person monthly newsletter fits inside it spread over four days, at €0. Amazon SES is the cheapest at any scale (~€0.10 per 1,000 emails — a 5,000-subscriber monthly send costs about 50 cents) but needs an AWS account and a one-time "production access" request that takes a day or two to approve. Verify current rates before committing; both change pricing occasionally. Your existing mailbox's SMTP is not an option here — personal and business mailboxes have daily sending limits and bulk mail from them reads as spam.

Monthly cost. Software: €0. Hosting: €0 extra if you already run a small server for the other blueprints in this library — Listmonk is a light housemate; otherwise ~€5–12/month for a small VPS. Sending: €0 on Brevo's free tier at small scale, or well under €2/month on SES for a few thousand subscribers. The per-subscriber fee simply does not exist in this architecture — a list of 10,000 costs the same to keep as a list of 100.

Setup outline

1. Deploy Listmonk with the official Docker compose file, behind HTTPS on your domain — news.yourbusiness.example. You'll see the login screen when it works.
2. Set the admin password and your sender identity ("Bakkerij Puur <[email protected]>") — a real address someone reads, because people reply to newsletters.
3. Do the DNS homework before the first send: SPF, DKIM and DMARC records for the sending domain. Your SMTP provider hands you the exact records; pasting them into your DNS panel takes ten minutes and decides whether you land in inboxes at all.
4. Connect the SMTP provider under Settings → SMTP and send yourself a test email. Check it arrives — and check the spam folder too.
5. Create your list with double opt-in switched on. Put Listmonk's hosted sign-up page behind a link on your website and a QR code at the counter.
6. Import your existing customers from CSV — only the ones who actually agreed to hear from you (more on this below).
7. Send campaign #1 to yourself and two colleagues on different providers (Gmail, Outlook). Read it on a phone — that's where most of your customers will.
8. Then keep the rhythm: one short, useful email a month beats three enthusiastic ones followed by silence.

Pitfalls — the real ones

Deliverability is the whole game. The most common way self-hosted newsletters fail is not the software — it's skipping SPF/DKIM/DMARC and starting with zero sender reputation. Since 2024, Gmail and Yahoo require bulk senders to have DMARC and a one-click unsubscribe (Listmonk includes the unsubscribe header; the DNS records are on you). Do step 3 before step 7, always.
Don't import everyone you've ever emailed. In the EU, sending marketing email needs consent; most countries allow a softer rule for existing customers you sold to, but the details vary by country — when in doubt, run the old list through a one-time "want to keep hearing from us?" double-opt-in email and keep only the yeses. A smaller list of people who said yes outperforms a big list of people who didn't, and it keeps you out of trouble.
The SES waiting room is not a bug. New Amazon SES accounts start in a sandbox that can only mail verified addresses. Requesting production access takes 24–48 hours. Plan it into the setup week, or start on Brevo and switch later.
Warm up, don't blast. A brand-new sending domain that fires 5,000 emails in one minute looks exactly like a spammer. For a first send to a larger list, let it go out over a few hours (Listmonk's send rate is configurable) and watch the bounce rate.
You are the vendor now. Updates and backups are your job — one Postgres dump before every upgrade is the entire discipline. Skip it long enough and the money you saved on subscriptions gets spent on one bad afternoon.

Verified repos

Listmonk — AGPL-3.0, 21.8k stars, v6.1.0 (March 2026), active (commits July 2026)