I open-sourced MailCheap for $0.10 per 1,000 emails

So many people asked me to make it open-source, so here you go: MailCheap β€” Self-hosted newsletters on Amazon SES: πŸ’Έ $0.10 per 1,000 emails ✍️ Editor with live preview πŸ“° Multiple newsletters πŸ“ Signup forms + API 🌐 Public archive πŸ“Š Stats & growth charts 🧹 List cleanup πŸ“¬ Bounce + spam protection β†’ github.com/marclou/mailch… 92% cheaper than Beehiiv (for me). Have fun!

Marc Lou@marclou Β· Oct 9, 2026Bye bye Beehiiv πŸ‘‹ I vibe-coded my own newsletter platform: πŸ“§ Campaign management w/ editor πŸ–₯️ Web archives (newsletter.marclou.com) πŸ”— API support 🫧 List cleanup, deliverability reports It took a few prompts with Opus 5.5. I left Beehiiv because they raised prices for the 3rd time in 2 years. - My first yearly bill was $1,000. - My future bill would have been $4,000. Now I'm using AWS SES + MongoDB, and I will pay less than $300/year. Newsletter platforms charge per subscriber, when in fact the real cost is the number of emails sent. Subscribers will naturally become inactive, so you end up paying more for something that hurts your deliverability (sending to dormant subscribers = spam trap). So I've set a cleanup cron job for my newsletter alternative. It marks inactive subs as dormant, sends one last re-engaging email, and stops emailing them. Money saved. Deliverability increased. I also gain a priceless feature: Freedom. I can change the UI, add features, connect all my apps - anything is possible with just a prompt. I'm replacing Resend next. I love it, but it's very expensive ($400/mo)
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  1. @marclou Β· Oct 10, 2026

    The public web archive design looks like this: newsletter.marclou.com

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  2. @marclou Β· Oct 10, 2026

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  3. @marclou Β· Oct 11, 2026

    @grok what are people saying mostly? summarize in 3-5 bullet poinst

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