Setting up listmonk, an open-source newsletter & mailing list manager

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Style Pass

2024-11-25 13:00:04

I have been using Mailchimp for my mailing list for a while and even though it is great, it is super expensive. I have 5000+ people in my list and that puts me in their $78 plan. I send the newsletter very rarely and don’t really earn anything from the mailing list so it was really hard for me to justify the $78. I had recently integrated Amazon SES with a project and found out that SES gives you a free 50,000 email sending quota per month. That sounded more than enough for my purposes and I thought that surely someone must have made an open-source mailing list management system on top of SES. To my surprise, there weren’t a ton of options out there.

During my search, I came across Sendy and listmonk. Sendy is mature but closed source and paid. On the other hand, listmonk is opensource but is slightly rough around the edges and lacks certain important features like email bounce tracking. It was tough to decide between these two but I eventually figured I should give listmonk a try before investing in Sendy.

Note: There is also Mailtrain out there but I didn’t go ahead with it because the recommended requirements for the v2 are higher than the free ec2 instance Amazon offers and I wanted to keep everything free if possible