MailCheap

MailCheap is a newsletter app: write an issue, send it to your list, publish it on the web. Self-host it free with your own Amazon SES or PostShiba account, or let us run it on MailCheap Cloud.

[!IMPORTANT] No support. Issues are off, and setup questions go unanswered. Fork it, deploy it, make it yours. Or let us run it: mailcheap.ai.

Self-host it free, or let us run it

This repository is the whole app: the dashboard, the public archive, the REST API, the MCP server and the docs. MailCheap Cloud runs this same code with MAILCHEAP_CLOUD=true, which adds plans and Stripe billing, and our own sending accounts. Its marketing site (the landing, pricing and legal pages) isn't part of the open source. Every change to the app ships to both.

	Self-hosted	MailCheap Cloud
Price	Free, plus what your provider charges per email	From $19 a month
Sending	Your Amazon SES or PostShiba account	Ours, set up for you
Who signs in	The emails you allow	Anyone who signs up
Limits	None	Emails per month and subscribers, per plan
Setup	About an hour, most of it waiting for DNS and production access	A few minutes

Why

Newsletter platforms charge for every subscriber, every month. With your own sending account you pay for the emails you send: 10,000 readers and 4 issues a month is 40,000 emails, about $4 to $6 on Amazon SES.

MailCheap is the rest of what a newsletter needs, in one Next.js app: an editor, a list, signup forms, unsubscribe handling, bounce and complaint handling, stats and a public archive. Your list stays in your database, and everything the dashboard does also works from an AI agent, through a REST API and an MCP server.

Features

Write and send

• Editor with a live email preview, slash commands and boxes. Images are dropped in, pasted, or picked from the ones you uploaded before. Markdown and raw HTML work too.
• Checks before every send: subject, preview text, unsubscribe link, size under Gmail's 100 KB clip, postal address, verified domain.
• Test emails, scheduling, and sending in batches through QStash.
• Send in steps: start with your most engaged readers, then send to more. A first send to contacts never mailed goes out in steps by itself: a 5% slice, then the rest 3 hours later if its bounces and complaints stay low.

Grow the list

• A signup form on the archive, and a signup API with API keys.
• Confirmed opt-in, on by default. Welcome email.
• CSV import from any platform. It leaves out invalid, misspelled (gmial.com), spam trap, role, throwaway, duplicate and suppressed addresses, and records that your readers agreed. Signups refuse misspellings with a suggestion.
• Contacts you add by hand are subscribed at once, without a confirmation email, once you tick that they agreed. MailCheap records who ticked it and when.
• Rate limits on signups, sign-in, unsubscribes, slug changes, the API, and the dashboard's test emails, sends, imports and uploads, on by default. An account's API keys, connected apps and dashboard share its limits, so more keys don't raise them.

Keep it healthy