MailCheap

MailCheap is an open-source newsletter app for writers who are tired of paying per subscriber. You write an issue in an editor with slash commands, images and boxes, review it against a pre-send checklist (subject, preview text, unsubscribe link, Gmail's 100 KB clip, postal address, sender), then send it, schedule it, or start with your most engaged readers and expand in steps.

Every issue gets its own public web page with a signup form, author page, share images and sitemap, and lists import as-is from beehiiv, Substack, Mailchimp, Kit, MailerLite, Buttondown, Ghost and EmailOctopus.

Pricing follows the same idea: MailCheap Cloud starts at $19 a month for 20,000 emails, while the self-hosted version is free apart from your provider's cost (about $0.10 to $0.16 per 1,000 emails on Amazon SES). Deliverability is built in: staged sending to new contacts, automatic list cleanup for dormant readers, contact cleaning that drops invalid and spam-trap addresses, and sends that pause past 2% hard bounces or 0.08% complaints.

Everything the dashboard does also works from an AI agent through an MCP server and a REST API, with sending marked as an action that cannot be undone, so agents ask first. Vibe-coded evidence, with an honesty label: this is NOT a first-person statement in the repository or on the product site.

It is third-party reporting of the author's own pitch — Seuros (October 2026) reports that Marc Lou 'vibe-coded a replacement with a few prompts with Opus 5.5' and that his 15 October pitch read 'I vibe-coded MailCheap, and it is 83% cheaper'; the repository independently ships agent scaffolding (.cursor/rules and AGENTS.md). The aiTools field is therefore left empty rather than upgraded from indirect reporting.

Honest limits, as the author states them: there is no free trial, self-hosting comes without support (issues are off), setup takes about an hour mostly waiting for DNS and Amazon SES production access, and all names and addresses in the screenshots are made up. GitHub stars: 1,514 at the 28 October 2026 check (179 commits, created 10 October 2026, AGPL-3.0); the product site was opened and confirmed working on 28 October 2026.