A newsletter is the one audience you are supposed to own. Followers belong to the platform, search traffic belongs to Google, but a list of email addresses is yours, the thing people mean when they say “build on land you own.” Then you pick a platform to send it, and the platform prices you by the size of that list. Every new reader is a tiny raise for the software. The better the newsletter does, the more it costs to send, and the land you own quietly turns into land you rent.
listmonk is what you get when someone refuses to put a meter on readers.
What listmonk actually is
listmonk is a free, open source newsletter and mailing list manager that you run on your own server. The repo describes it as a “high performance, self-hosted, newsletter and mailing list manager” and it is built in a refreshingly boring way: a backend in Go, a Vue frontend, packed into a single binary whose only dependency is a Postgres database. You download it, run an install command, and you have a dashboard. There is a Docker Compose file if you would rather do it that way.
What you get on that dashboard is most of what a working newsletter needs. Subscriber lists with single and double opt-in, and segmentation with real SQL when you want to send to a slice of them. Templates you can write in a drag-and-drop builder, a WYSIWYG editor, Markdown, HTML or plain text. Campaign analytics with bounces and top links. A transactional API for password resets and receipts. A media library that can sit on S3-compatible storage, OIDC single sign-on and role permissions for a team, and a public archive page so new readers can browse past issues. The sending engine is multi-threaded with rate limits and multiple SMTP queues, which is a fancy way of saying it will push a big list out fast through whatever mail provider you point it at.
It is AGPL licensed, it has close to twenty-four thousand stars on GitHub, and it is very much alive: version 7.0.0-beta.1 came out on October 20, 2026, the day before this post.
listmonk has no subscriber tiers because it has no reason to count. The only number that grows with your list is the price of sending the email itself.
Why a beehiiv alternative, and why now
On October 1, beehiiv changed its plans. In a post signed by its founder Tyler Denk, Launch became Free, Scale became Lite and Max became Pro, with the new pricing live for new customers that day. Existing customers keep their price until their first renewal on or after November 1, 2026 (annual customers keep it through their current term). The post calls this only the second time the company has changed its pricing, which is fair, and it keeps a real free plan for up to 2,500 subscribers.
Above that, the price follows the list. On beehiiv's pricing page today (checked Oct 21, 2026), Lite is $59 a month for up to 1,000 subscribers, or $49 a month billed yearly. At 10,000 subscribers Lite is $139 a month and Pro is $239. At 100,000 it is $469 for Lite and $699 for Pro. beehiiv's own post does not put a percentage on the change, and its old prices are not on its site anymore, so we will not guess at one. You do not need the old number to see the shape of the new one.
Now price the same 10,000-person list on listmonk. If you send weekly, that is a little over 43,000 emails a month. Amazon SES, one of the providers listmonk's docs name for bounce handling, charges new accounts $0.16 per 1,000 emails on its default Essentials plan (checked Oct 21, 2026). That is about seven dollars a month in sending, plus a small server you may already be paying for. The software costs nothing, and it costs the same nothing at 100,000 readers.
It is a wave, not one app
listmonk is the most single-minded tool in a surprisingly full corner. Ghost is the big one, MIT licensed with more than fifty-five thousand stars (repo), and it is the open option if you want a website, a newsletter and paid memberships in one place. Keila is an AGPL newsletter tool that pitches itself as an open source alternative to Mailchimp (repo). Plunk mixes transactional mail, campaigns and automations under AGPL (repo), and Mautic has been the self-hosted marketing automation workhorse for years. One honest footnote: Notifuse is still described as open source, but its README says version 40 and later ship under the Business Source License, turning AGPL four years after each release. Read the licence, not the label.
The pattern shows up in our own numbers too. Of the 378 email marketing tools live on AppClap today, 39 can be self-hosted. That is about one in ten, and almost every one of them has the same pitch: your list, your server, no meter.
What you actually take on
Here is the part the paid platforms are right about. When you run listmonk, deliverability is your problem. You set up the sending domain, the SPF and DKIM records, the bounce handling, and you watch your reputation, because a list that lands in spam is worth nothing no matter how cheap it was to send. listmonk sends through an SMTP provider you configure, and its docs warn that some hosts block outgoing mail ports, so “self-hosted” still means signing up with somebody to actually deliver the mail.
You also give up everything that is not sending. A platform like beehiiv is a whole publication with the email attached, and even its free plan comes with what its post calls “full access to all core products.” listmonk is only the sending part. We did not find paid subscriptions anywhere in its docs, so if you charge readers, Ghost is the closer fit, or the paid platform earns its fee. And nobody at listmonk is on call for you. When an update breaks at 2am, the support desk is a GitHub issue.
- 1Is your list big enough that per-subscriber pricing is now a real line on the budget?
- 2Are you comfortable setting up SPF, DKIM and a sending provider like SES?
- 3Do you mostly send, rather than relying on a platform to grow and monetise the list?
- 4Does someone on your team keep a small server patched and backed up?
This series keeps finding the same thing behind different doors. First it was dictation and meeting notes, then the deploy platform and the inbox, then the CRM, then the login at the front of the house, and now the mailbox at the end of the drive, the one channel that was supposed to belong to you from the start. We keep writing these at AppClap because the job of a search engine for software is to put the free, owned option on the same page as the one with the marketing budget, and then let you decide. If you are pricing a move, our beehiiv alternatives page lists what we track, or just describe it the way people already do on the site: an open source newsletter tool I can host myself. The reaper is at the mailbox now. Before your list crosses the next pricing tier, it is worth thirty seconds on the question this whole series keeps asking. Do you want to rent your readers, or own them?
