Maillayer – Send email campaigns via Amazon SES with NoCode

Maillayer AI
AI Email tool
Send email campaigns via Amazon SES with NoCode

Website：maillayer.com

If you are troubled by the ever-increasing monthly subscription fees of Mailchimp and SendGrid, Maillayer offers a simple and straightforward solution: buy out the email marketing platform once and for all, install it on your own server, and use Amazon SES as the “mail carrier”, spending only $1 for 10,000 newsletters. No monthly rent, no contact limits, no brand quantity restrictions, 100% open-source and auditable code, and your data forever remains in your own database—this is Maillayer’s core selling point and why it is called the “self-hosted version of Mailchimp” by over 200 technical teams.

Maillayer’s Main Features

Maillayer breaks down the three essential tasks—“getting emails out, seeing the data, and managing operations”—into a visual workflow:

• Campaign Side: Drag-and-drop template editor + multi-file upload, supports HTML/AMP mixed format, and brand master templates can be completed in 30 seconds.
• Data Side: Real-time event callbacks (delivery, open, click, unsubscribe, bounce), Geo-IP mapped directly to the city level, facilitating regional A/B testing.
• Touchpoint Side: Built-in Transactional API, enabling one-click connection with registration, payment, and logistics events, completing both marketing and transactional channels on the same platform.
• Operations Side: Domain warm-up engine automatically scales sending volume gradually, starting with 50 emails per day and step-climbing to a daily volume of tens of thousands within 14 days.
• Integration Side: Official Webhook access to Zapier, Make, and n8n, allowing zero-code synchronization of Shopify, WordPress, and Notion data to your lists.

All these features are packaged as a Docker image, deployed with 3 commands. Future upgrades are also a two-step process of “pull and restart,” making the operational threshold lower than self-hosting WordPress.

The Difference Between Self-Hosted Email and Traditional Methods

The pricing logic of traditional SaaS is “tiered pricing based on contacts,” where 10,000 subscribers require $100/month, and you can only bind one top-level domain. Maillayer changes the pricing dimension to “actual sending volume,” using Amazon SES underneath. The official SES rate is free for 0–62,000 emails/month, and $0.1/thousand for the excess. Translating this, if you have the same 10,000 members receiving 4 newsletters per month, the SES cost is about $0.4. Adding the self-hosted server’s monthly rent of $10, the total expenditure is less than $11, which is one-tenth of Mailchimp’s pricing.

More importantly, there is data ownership. GDPR Article 28 requires the data controller to be able to “terminate processing and delete data at any time,” which self-hosting inherently satisfies. In contrast, SaaS platforms often categorize export permissions as premium features, leading to both legal risks and vendor lock-in. Maillayer runs MySQL and Redis locally, with open-source backup scripts, ensuring compliance and auditing in one go.

Maillayer Email Success Rate Introduction

The author has publicly shared 24 months of operation logs on Product Hunt: an average delivery rate of 97.8%, an open rate of 30–62%, an unsubscribe rate of 0.4%, and a bounce rate of 1.1%. These numbers are backed by a three-fold mechanism:

1. Rate Adaptation: Maillayer reads the AWS SES account-level limit (e.g., 14 emails/second) and automatically reduces the sending rate by 30% to avoid ISP instantaneous traffic interception.
2. Dual Domain Isolation: Transactional and marketing domains are managed in separate pools, so Reputation does not affect each other, conforming to the “separate sending identities” recommendation in the Amazon SES Best Practices Whitepaper (2023).
3. Warm-up Algorithm: Dynamically adjusts the daily quota based on the “7-day rolling average” feedback from Senderscore and Gmail Postmaster, boosting new domain reputation to 90+ in 14 days.

It is worth noting that Amazon SES itself does not restrict marketing/transactional type, only assessing the complaint rate (<0.1%) and bounce rate (<5%). As long as the list is legitimate and the content is compliant, SES can also maintain a high inbox rate—a point Maillayer has verified with two years of data.

What is the Maillayer Price and Discount?

The official policy uses an “early bird seat” model: a total of 200 spots, with 38 spots remaining at the time of writing. The original price is $249, but is temporarily reduced by $150 for a one-time buyout of $99, which includes:

• Lifetime updates (guaranteed free upgrades within the same major version number).
• Unlimited domains, brands, and contact quantities.
• 30-day no-questions-asked refund.

Calculated over a 2-year usage cycle, the daily cost is $0.13, roughly the price of a pour-over coffee sachet. When extending to multiple servers, the license does not restrict the number of instances, only requiring the same actual controller, which is very friendly to agencies and SaaS secondary development.

Who is Maillayer Suitable For?

1. Startups: Tight seed-round budgets, but needing to send weekly reports to 50,000 early users.
2. Cross-border E-commerce: Sites distributed across different top-level domains, requiring a unified data dashboard.
3. Privacy-Sensitive Scenarios: Medical, education, and finance industries that need to meet domestic compliance or GDPR.
4. Tech Blogs/Media: Sending both subscription updates and registration verification codes, wanting a “single codebase” solution.
5. Agencies: Managing operations for dozens of clients, but not wanting to be “commissioned” by SaaS platforms again.

To summarize in one sentence—if you detest the “subscription model” and are sensitive to data sovereignty and cost, Maillayer is currently the lowest barrier to entry and most mature solution in the self-hosted email sector.