Listmonk: A Self-Hosted Mailchimp Alternative for Newsletters
Mailchimp bills on your list size, not how often you actually email people — a quiet subscriber costs the same as an engaged one. Self-hosted Listmonk flips that: you only pay for what you actually send.
Mailchimp's pricing is built around one number: how many contacts are in your list. A subscriber who hasn't opened an email in a year costs exactly as much as your most engaged reader, and the bill goes up as your list grows whether or not you're sending more. That's the piece self-hosting actually changes here.
What the list-size model costs
| Mailchimp | |
|---|---|
| 500 contacts | $13/month (Essentials) |
| 5,000 contacts | $75/month (Essentials) or $100/month (Standard) |
That's billed monthly regardless of whether you send one campaign or ten — and Mailchimp counts unsubscribed contacts and duplicates across audiences toward your total, so in practice most people pay for more than their actual active list.
What Listmonk charges instead
Listmonk is a self-hosted newsletter and mailing list manager — a single Go binary backed by Postgres, built specifically to handle large lists efficiently. It doesn't meter your contact count at all. The only real cost is what it costs to actually send email, through whatever SMTP relay you point it at.
Using Amazon SES as an example (a common, cheap choice for this): sending is $0.10 per 1,000 emails. A list of 5,000 people getting 4 sends a month is 20,000 emails — that's $2/month in actual sending cost, on top of the same $6–$12/month VPS this whole stack runs on.
| Mailchimp (5,000 contacts) | Self-hosted Listmonk | |
|---|---|---|
| Monthly cost | $75.00 | ~$14.00 ($12 VPS + $2 sending) |
That's about an 81% reduction, and unlike the list-size model, it scales with what you actually do, not how big your list happens to be.
What you're taking on
Sending your own email is the part of this swap that actually requires care, more than running the software itself:
- Deliverability is now your job. SPF, DKIM, and DMARC records need to be set up correctly, and a brand-new sending domain needs to warm up gradually or you'll land in spam folders. Mailchimp has spent years building sender reputation on your behalf; a fresh SES account hasn't.
- Unsubscribes and compliance are yours to handle. Listmonk supports unsubscribe links and list management, but you're responsible for actually respecting them correctly under CAN-SPAM/GDPR — there's no platform compliance team backstopping you.
If you're sending your first newsletter ever and don't want to think about any of that yet, start on Mailchimp's free tier or a similar hosted option. This swap makes the most sense once you have an established list and are confident in the deliverability basics.
I run this on the same kind of small Vultr instance as the rest of the stack — see the full cost roll-up for how it all fits together.
Disclosure: this post contains an affiliate link to Vultr. If you sign up through it, I may earn a commission at no extra cost to you. I only link to providers I actually use.