---
draft: false
title: "Email and SMS Campaigns You Can Afford"
cateogry: productivity
date: 2026-07-08T00:00:00+08:00
---

# Meet Listmonk: Self-Hosted Email Campaigns Without the Monthly Bill

If your team is paying for Mailchimp, ConvertKit, or any other SaaS email platform and the per-subscriber or per-send pricing is starting to feel like a tax on your own audience — Listmonk is worth a serious look. It's a free, open-source, self-hosted newsletter and mailing list manager that's genuinely high-performance, packed with features, and ships as a single binary you can run anywhere.

No per-subscriber fees. No sending limits imposed by a vendor. Your list, your data, your infrastructure.

## Surprisingly Capable for Something So Lightweight

The performance numbers on Listmonk are worth pausing on. A production instance sending a campaign of **7+ million emails** runs with CPU usage at a fraction of a single core and peak RAM usage of just 57 MB. That's not a typo. It's multi-threaded, supports multiple SMTP queues simultaneously, and has throughput and sliding window rate limiting for fine-grained control. For teams running large lists, this changes the economics of email dramatically — you're only paying for the SMTP provider you choose to send through, not a SaaS platform's margin on top of it.

## Full-Featured, Not a Compromise

Listmonk handles both campaign emails and transactional emails from the same platform. On the campaign side: single and double opt-in lists, subscriber segmentation using SQL expressions, built-in analytics for campaign performance, bounces, and top links, and a flexible templating engine built on Go's template language with 100+ functions available for dynamic content.

For writing emails, you're not locked into one editor. WYSIWYG drag-and-drop, a visual editor, Markdown, raw HTML, and plain text are all supported — whatever fits your workflow.

On the transactional side, there's a simple API for sending templated messages to subscribers. And it's not just email: Messenger interfaces let you send via SMS, WhatsApp, FCM push notifications, or any other medium via HTTP webhooks. For teams that want a single platform for all outbound messaging, this is a meaningful capability.

## Runs Everywhere, Installs in Minutes

Listmonk ships as a single binary for Linux, macOS, Windows, FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD. Docker Compose setup is two commands. One-click deploy options are available through Nodion, Railway, PikaPods, Elestio, Zeabur, Northflank, Kloudbean, Cloudzy, and LumaDock if you'd rather not manage the server yourself.

It backs onto PostgreSQL, supports S3-compatible object storage for the media library, and includes OIDC SSO authentication with granular roles, permissions, and API tokens for teams that need proper access controls.

## The Bottom Line

If you're technically capable of running a web app — and if you're reading this, you are — Listmonk lets you take full ownership of your email infrastructure at a fraction of the ongoing cost of any SaaS alternative. You bring your own SMTP provider (SES, Postmark, Mailgun, or anything else), point Listmonk at it, and you're sending. The license is AGPLv3, the backend is Go, the frontend is Vue, and the project has been actively maintained since 2018.

---

Learn more at [federated.computer](https://federated.computer). Want to offer Listmonk to your customers or partners? Check out [Federated Enterprise](https://enterprise.federated.computer).
