Email marketing: guides & tutorials

Billionmail and Listmonk are both self-hosted, open-source email tools. But comparing them head-to-head misses the point: they solve different problems, and the most effective self-hosted email stack often uses both together.

Mautic and Listmonk are the two most common self-hosted answers to Mailchimp and HubSpot email — but they solve different problems. Listmonk is a high-performance newsletter sender. Mautic is a full marketing automation platform with drip campaigns, lead scoring, landing pages, and CRM-lite features. Picking the wrong one means either paying for complexity you don't need or hitting a ceiling on automation you can't reach.

Mailchimp Essentials charges $20/month for 500 contacts and 6,000 sends. Self-hosting removes both caps: a Liquid Web 2–4 GB Managed VPS running Listmonk can send to an unlimited subscriber list at the cost of your SMTP relay — typically $1–3 per 10,000 emails via Postmark or Mailgun.

TL;DR

• One docker-compose.yml deploys Authentik (SSO) + Plausible (analytics) + Postal (SMTP) + shared PostgreSQL + MySQL + ClickHouse + RabbitMQ + Redis + Caddy; Coolify installs separately via its own script
• Measured idle RAM: ~4.6 GB total across the host (our Compose stack + Coolify's stack)
• Minimum Liquid Web tier: 16 GB Managed VPS (~$50/mo) — the 16 GB gives comfortable room for apps you deploy through Coolify
• Vercel Pro ($20/mo) + Auth0 Essentials ($23/mo) + Postmark ($15/mo) = $58/mo just for foundations; this stack: ~$50/mo with unlimited apps, SSO, pageviews, and email

This is the "meta stack" — the infrastructure layer you deploy before anything else. Every other self-hosted app you run needs a place to live (Coolify), a way to log users in (Authentik), a way to measure traffic (Plausible), and a way to send email (Postal, the open-source SMTP platform). This guide wires all four together on a single Liquid Web 16 GB VPS as a reusable foundation.

TL;DR

• One docker-compose.yml: Listmonk (newsletters) + Postal (SMTP delivery) + Billionmail (IP reputation) + PostgreSQL 16 + MySQL 8.0 + RabbitMQ + Redis 7 + Caddy
• Measured idle RAM: 2.4 GB; peak: 3.5 GB (10k Listmonk campaign + Postal queue flush)
• Requires an 8 GB VPS with a dedicated IP — self-hosted email is an ops commitment, not a drop-in replacement
• Replaces Mailchimp Essentials ($20/mo) + Postmark ($15/mo for 10k emails) with unlimited sending at ~$33/mo VPS + dedicated IP
• Postal requires MySQL 8.0 and RabbitMQ — read the first-run section carefully before starting

This guide deploys a three-layer self-hosted email stack: Listmonk handles subscriber lists and campaign management, Postal provides the SMTP delivery engine with bounce processing and DKIM signing, and Billionmail monitors IP reputation and blacklist status. Together they replace the Mailchimp + Postmark combination for teams that want full control over their email infrastructure.

TL;DR

• One docker-compose.yml: Plausible + Formbricks + Mautic + PostgreSQL 16 + ClickHouse + MariaDB 10.11 + Redis + Caddy
• Measured idle RAM: ~2.3 GB; peak: ~3.5 GB (500 Plausible events/min + 50 active surveys + Mautic sending a 2k campaign)
• Minimum Liquid Web tier: 8 GB Managed VPS (~$30–$40/mo)
• GA4 (free) + Typeform ($50/mo) + ActiveCampaign ($49/mo) = $99/mo; this stack: ~$30/mo on your own server

Most SaaS teams have three separate tools that should talk to each other but don't: an analytics platform, a user feedback tool, and an email automation platform. The data lives in three silos. You see a traffic spike in GA4, you have NPS responses in Typeform, and you have email segments in ActiveCampaign — but you can't close the loop automatically. This stack connects all three: Plausible fires a goal event when a user reaches a key page, Formbricks uses that signal to trigger an NPS survey, and a Formbricks webhook pushes the response straight into Mautic where a campaign branches on score.

TL;DR

• One docker-compose.yml: Billionmail (SMTP) + Mautic (automation) + PostgreSQL + MariaDB + Caddy
• Measured idle RAM: 2.0 GB; peak: 3.6 GB (5k campaign + 500 emails/hr SMTP queue)
• Requires a 16 GB VPS with a dedicated IP — Mautic alone needs 8 GB; adding Billionmail needs the extra headroom
• Read the sustainability flags for both tools before committing: Billionmail is early-stage; Mautic has a documented 2026 funding crisis
• Mailgun Flex + ActiveCampaign Plus (10k contacts): ~$110/mo; this stack: ~$40–$55/mo on Liquid Web

This guide pairs Billionmail (self-hosted SMTP server) with Mautic (marketing automation) on a single Liquid Web 16 GB VPS. Mautic handles contact segmentation, campaign flows, landing pages, and lead scoring. Billionmail provides the SMTP relay that Mautic sends through.