Brevo charges you more as you send more. Punchmail is one price, unlimited sends, and you own your sending reputation instead of sharing theirs.
Punchmail isn't a hobby project with a queue bolted on. It's a multi-layered sending engine designed from day one to handle millions of emails without breaking a sweat.
7 priority queues — tracking, sending, campaigns, automations, bounces, imports, default. Each with dedicated workers via Laravel Horizon.
Campaigns split into 500-subscriber batches. Multiple workers process batches simultaneously. Template compiled once, cached in Redis, reused across all batches.
Every open, click, bounce, and unsubscribe stored in ClickHouse with 6 materialized views for instant aggregation. No more slow MySQL GROUP BY on millions of rows.
Redis SETNX locks → MySQL unique index with INSERT IGNORE → job idempotency. Three layers guarantee zero duplicate sends, even during crashes and restarts.
Enterprise email marketing features without the enterprise price tag. Built by someone who's been sending email since before Gmail existed.
Drag-and-drop email builder with 10 block types. Compiles to bulletproof HTML via MJML. Looks perfect in every client — yes, even Outlook.
Nested AND/OR conditions across subscriber fields, tags, engagement history, and campaign activity. "Opened campaign X but didn't click in 90 days" — milliseconds.
Trigger-based workflows with conditions, delays, and actions. Welcome series, re-engagement, cart abandonment. Set it and forget it.
Connect any SMTP provider. Create pools with weighted distribution for IP warmup. Automatic failover. Per-campaign throttling. This is what enterprise ESPs charge thousands for.
Event tracking powered by ClickHouse. Millions of events, instant queries. Full per-campaign reports and per-subscriber activity timeline.
Test subject lines and content with 2-3 variants. Auto-send the winner based on opens or clicks. Data-driven sending.
IMAP/POP3 mailbox polling plus webhook receivers for SES, Postmark, and SendGrid. Automatic hard/soft classification with configurable thresholds.
Multiple suppression lists with email AND domain blocking. Platform-wide suppression for spamtraps and global unsubscribes. Three-layer dedup prevents duplicate sends.
RFC 8058 one-click unsubscribe (Gmail/Yahoo required), in-body unsubscribe, and full preference center. List-Unsubscribe headers automatic on every send.
Brevo (formerly Sendinblue) positions itself as the affordable Mailchimp alternative. And compared to Mailchimp, it is cheaper. But Brevo's pricing is based on email volume, not subscribers. The Starter plan gives you 20,000 emails/month for $25. Need 100,000? That's $65/month. Growing your list or increasing send frequency directly increases your bill — every single month.
The deeper problem is shared sending infrastructure. On Brevo, your emails are sent from their IP pools alongside thousands of other customers. If other senders on the same IPs have poor practices, your deliverability suffers. You can't control which IPs you send from, can't warm up your own IPs, and can't build an independent sender reputation.
Brevo also keeps all your data on their servers. Your subscriber lists, engagement history, and analytics are locked inside their platform. If you ever want to leave, you get a CSV export and lose years of engagement data, click maps, and behavioral insights. Your marketing intelligence becomes their leverage.
Punchmail flips this model. €49 once, unlimited sends, your own SMTP providers with pools and failover. Your data lives on your server. Your sender reputation is yours alone. Your costs don't scale with success — they stay flat whether you send 10,000 or 1,000,000 emails a month.
€49 once. No per-email charges, no volume tiers, no monthly fees. Your bill doesn't grow when your list does.
Connect your own SMTP providers with pools and failover. Build your own sender reputation instead of sharing Brevo's shared IP pools.
Subscriber lists, engagement history, analytics — all on your server. No vendor lock-in, no lost data when you move.
Real-time analytics powered by ClickHouse on your infrastructure. Your engagement data never leaves your server.
We're not competing with Mailchimp's marketing budget. We're competing with their feature set.
| Punchmail | Brevo | Mailchimp | ActiveCampaign | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Self-hosted | ✓ | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ |
| Unlimited sends | ✓ | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ |
| Own sending reputation | ✓ | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ |
| Own your data | ✓ | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ |
| Block email editor | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Automation workflows | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| SMTP pools + warmup | ✓ | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ |
| ClickHouse analytics | ✓ | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ |
| No monthly fees | ✓ | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ |
| Pricing | €29 once | $25-65+/mo | $350+/mo | $259+/mo |
No PhD required. If you can copy-paste three commands, you can run Punchmail.
Clone the repo, copy the environment file, set your admin credentials.
git clone https://github.com/punchmail/punchmail && cp .env.example .env
One command spins up all 7 containers — app, database, analytics, queue, cache, email renderer. Done.
docker compose up -d
Add your SMTP provider in settings — Amazon SES, Postmark, your own Postfix, whatever. Create pools, set weights, configure failover.
Import subscribers, build your first campaign with the block editor, hit send. Welcome to email freedom.
No subscriber tiers. No send limits. No "contact sales." Just a price that makes sense.
🚀 Launch price for the first 100 customers. Then €99.
On Brevo I was paying $65/month to send 100K emails. With Punchmail and SES, the same volume costs me about $10/month in sending fees. The platform itself was €49 once. The math is simple.
Your subscribers. Your data. Your server. One price, forever.