Mailchimp charges $350/month. ActiveCampaign $259/month. Punchmail charges €49. Once. That's it. No subscriber tiers, no send limits.
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.
Email marketing SaaS companies have perfected the subscription trap. Start free, get hooked on the platform, watch the price climb as your list grows. At 10,000 subscribers, Mailchimp charges $100/month. At 50,000, it's $350+. At 100,000, over $700. Over 5 years with a 50K list, that's $21,000 — for software that sends emails.
The pricing model is designed to extract maximum value from your growth. The more successful your email marketing becomes (bigger list, more engagement), the more you pay. It's a tax on success. And because your data, automations, and templates are locked in, switching costs are high enough to keep you paying.
Self-hosted email marketing breaks this cycle. Punchmail is €49 one-time. Your only ongoing cost is your server (~$20-50/month) and SMTP sending (Amazon SES costs $0.10 per 1,000 emails). For a 50,000-subscriber list sending weekly, that's roughly $25/month in infrastructure — compared to $350+/month for Mailchimp.
Over three years, the math is stark: Mailchimp at 50K subscribers costs ~$12,600. Punchmail + server + SES costs ~$2,700 total. That's $10,000 in savings — money you could spend on content, design, ads, or just profit. And you own your data, your infrastructure, and your independence.
Not per month. Not per year. Once. All features included, all future updates included. No surprise bills.
Compared to Mailchimp at 50K subscribers, Punchmail + hosting + SES saves over $10,000 in three years.
No pricing based on list size. 1,000 or 1,000,000 subscribers — the platform cost is the same.
Amazon SES: $0.10/1,000 emails. Send 100,000 emails for $10. The actual cost of sending email is almost nothing.
We're not competing with Mailchimp's marketing budget. We're competing with their feature set.
| Punchmail | Mailchimp | Brevo | ActiveCampaign | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Platform cost | €29 once | $350+/mo | $65+/mo | $259+/mo |
| 3-year cost (50K subs) | ~$2,700 | ~$12,600 | ~$7,800 | ~$10,800 |
| Unlimited subscribers | ✓ | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ |
| Unlimited sends | ✓ | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ |
| No price increases | ✓ | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ |
| Block email editor | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Automation workflows | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Self-hosted | ✓ | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ |
| Own your data | ✓ | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ |
| SMTP pools | ✓ | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ |
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.
I calculated what I'd spend on Mailchimp over the next 5 years: over $20,000. I spent €49 on Punchmail, $30/month on a Hetzner server, and pennies on SES. I'll never go back to subscription email marketing.
Your subscribers. Your data. Your server. One price, forever.