Maillayer

Maillayer is a self-hosted Mailchimp alternative you buy once and deploy on your own server. It sends campaigns, drip sequences, and transactional email through Amazon SES, SendGrid, Mailgun, Postmark, or plain SMTP. If per-contact pricing and email volume tiers have been eating your budget, this moves the sending account and the subscriber data back under your control.

What stands out in this Maillayer review is how light the stack is. One Docker container, a single SQLite file with a nightly backup, no Redis or Postgres cluster to babysit. Tag-based contacts, hosted forms, geo analytics, multi-brand support, and Stripe, Supabase, Firebase, Airtable, and Google Sheets integrations fit founders and small teams comfortable with a VPS.

For a marketing tool, the setup story is refreshingly plain: one install script, or a one-click Railway deploy, then per-domain SPF, DKIM, and DMARC that verify automatically. Pricing is a one-time payment with lifetime updates and a 30-day money-back guarantee. If you already run your own infrastructure and want to own your list, Maillayer is worth a look.