Listmonk

What it does

Manage subscriber lists, design email campaigns in a visual editor, and send via your own SMTP or a transactional email service. Supports templating, segmentation, and analytics - all from a fast, single-binary app.

Why we like it

Mailchimp charges $13/month for 500 contacts and scales steeply. Listmonk charges $0 for unlimited contacts. The trade-off: you handle email deliverability (use a service like Resend or Amazon SES for actual sending - both have generous free tiers). For a 10,000-subscriber list, that's $0 vs $110/month.

What it replaces

Mailchimp, ConvertKit, AWeber, Brevo (Sendinblue)

Setup guide

Here's the setup, step by step. Manage subscriber lists, design email campaigns in a visual editor, and send via your own SMTP or a transactional email service. Supports templating, segmentation, and analytics - all from a fast, single-binary app.

The code

This is the actual configuration you'll use. Lines you need to edit are highlighted.

services:  listmonk:    image: listmonk/listmonk:latest    ports: ["9000:9000"]    environment:      - LISTMONK_app__address=0.0.0.0:9000      - LISTMONK_db__host=db      - LISTMONK_db__user=listmonk      - LISTMONK_db__password=change-me  ← set a password    depends_on: [db]  db:    image: postgres:16

Resource cost

Runs on a $5/month VPS (1GB RAM). Needs Postgres.