OwnMaily is self-hosted email marketing. Your subscribers, your server, your data. No per-contact tiers, no monthly fee that grows as you do, no platform risk.
You pay more as you grow. The tool that should reward your success punishes it. Mailchimp charges $350/month at 50k subscribers. ConvertKit is $290. These are recurring fees for software that does not get 3x better each year. You are renting a list you built yourself.
Your subscriber list lives in your Postgres database, on your server. Not exported, not synced, not held hostage. If you stop using OwnMaily tomorrow, your data is already yours.
Indie founders and bootstrappers carry a stack of monthly bills. Email marketing is usually one of the biggest. OwnMaily replaces it with a server cost you were probably already paying.
Platforms change pricing, deprecate features, or shut down. When your list is self-hosted and MIT licensed, none of that applies to you. Fork it if you want to.
Connect Resend, Mailgun, or Amazon SES. OwnMaily handles the queue, tracking, and bounce handling. Your SMTP provider just sends the mail. Switch providers any time, no re-imports.
Who this is for: Indie founders, bootstrappers, solo newsletter operators, and anyone running a small business who thinks paying $50/month for software that sends emails is absurd. If you are comfortable running a Docker container, OwnMaily is for you. If you are not, the one-click Railway or Render deploy takes five minutes.
Pick the path that fits how you work. Both end in the same place: your own OwnMaily instance, ready to send.
curl https://ownmaily.com/install.sh | bash. Docker and Docker Compose are pulled automatically if missing. .env with a random secret is created and the stack starts. OwnMaily is live on port 4400. Built for the actual job: send campaigns to your list, track opens and clicks, manage bounces, grow your subscribers.
No tiers. No contact limits. Grow your list as large as your server handles, which is very large.
Per-campaign open rates and per-link click counts. Tracking pixel and redirect proxy built in.
Hard bounces suppress immediately. Soft bounces retry, then suppress after 3 attempts. Suppression list managed automatically.
Drop a single script tag anywhere. The form renders inline and submits to your instance. Double opt-in optional per list.
The UI is built entirely on the public API. Use it to integrate OwnMaily with anything: Zapier, your own app, AI agents.
Organize subscribers into lists and tag them however you want. Send campaigns to a list or a tag. CSV import and export.
There are no tiers, no asterisks, and no annual-plan discount that implies a monthly plan exists. OwnMaily is free software. The $49 is optional support.
Clone the repo, run Docker Compose, done. MIT licensed. Nothing is locked, nothing expires. OwnMaily is free software.
You are not buying a license. You are backing the idea that software you host yourself should not cost you a recurring fee. This keeps OwnMaily maintained and independent.