Run Your Newsletter for Free With Listmonk: Self-Hosted Email Marketing Without Per-Contact Pricing

Install the open-source Listmonk mailing-list manager and send campaigns from your own server with your own SMTP

Run Your Newsletter for Free With Listmonk

By the end of this guide, you'll have Listmonk, the open-source newsletter and mailing-list manager (AGPLv3, 23,000+ GitHub stars, built by Kailash Nadh), running on your own server with PostgreSQL and your own SMTP relay, so you can manage subscribers and send campaigns with no per-contact subscription. The software is free; the only costs are the server, the database, and the email-sending provider you plug in.

Who This Is For

• Marketers and founders paying Mailchimp-style per-contact pricing for a list they could host themselves

• Agencies that want one email platform for several client lists

• Anyone comfortable managing a small VPS and a Postgres database

What You'll Have

• Listmonk running at localhost:9000 (or your server) with subscriber management at scale

• A drag-and-drop HTML email builder, WYSIWYG, Markdown, raw HTML, or plain-text campaigns

• Templating with logic and 100+ functions, a transactional messaging API, and a full REST API

• Webhook messengers for SMS, WhatsApp, and push notifications, not just email

What You'll Need

• A server or VM (a small VPS is enough) or a third-party host; Listmonk has no affiliation with the hosts it lists

• A PostgreSQL database (the only hard dependency)

• An SMTP provider or relay to actually send mail

• Docker, or the Listmonk binary for macOS, Linux, Windows, or BSD

Going Further

— Try the live demo on listmonk.app before installing

— A cited production example sent 7+ million emails using a fraction of one CPU core and 57 MB of peak RAM

— Guide: Lead Nurture Sequences That Sell Without Selling (Lead Generation)