Sendyvs
MailerLite
MailerLite: If you want a cheap hosted platform with a real editor and someone else owning deliverability
Sendy
Self-hosted newsletter app bought once for $69 that sends through your own Amazon SES account
As of 31 August 2026, Sendy starts at $69/one-time. Sendy is a PHP application you buy once for $69, install on your own hosting and point at Amazon SES, which brings bulk email cost to roughly a dollar per ten thousand messages. Softwr lists it under Email Marketing. Sendy is available on Web, Linux.
Overview
What Sendy does
Sendy is a self-hosted email newsletter application written in PHP with a MySQL or MariaDB database. It manages lists, subscribers, segments, campaigns, autoresponders and reporting, and hands actual delivery to Amazon Simple Email Service using your own AWS credentials. Installation is comparable to setting up WordPress: upload files, create a database, add SES keys. The commercial model is the whole point. Hosted senders charge a monthly subscription that scales with list size, so a 100,000-contact list costs hundreds of dollars a month indefinitely. Sendy charges $69 once, and Amazon SES charges roughly $1 per 10,000 emails, so the same list sent to weekly costs a few dollars a month in delivery. For a publisher or an agency with large lists and predictable sending, the payback against a hosted platform is usually inside the first two months. The vendor also sells an AI assistant bundle at $39 and an installation service at $79 for those who do not want to touch a server. The buyers are technically comfortable publishers, agencies running client lists, and businesses with large lists and simple needs. The trade-offs are substantial and worth being blunt about: you are now the deliverability team, SES requires production access approval and its own reputation management, the licence covers free updates only until the next major version, and there is no vendor to call when a campaign to fifty thousand people goes to spam.
What people use it for
- A publisher with a large list sending frequently, where a hosted platform bills by subscriber count month after month
- An agency managing newsletters for several clients who each get their own brand and login under one licence
- A business that must keep subscriber data on its own infrastructure for privacy or contractual reasons
- A developer wiring signups from a custom application into a mailing list without paying platform API fees
Related searches
The honest half
Where it falls short
Concrete and checkable, so you can decide whether any of them matter to you. This is the half of a review a vendor will not write about Sendy.
- Free updates run only to the next major version, so the one-time purchase is really one purchase per major release and the long-term cost is not zero.
- Deliverability becomes entirely your problem: SES gives you a raw sending pipe and no warm-up guidance, reputation dashboards or deliverability consultants when a campaign starts landing in spam.
- Amazon SES requires production access approval and will suspend accounts on high bounce or complaint rates, which can take a list offline mid-campaign with little warning.
- The template editor and design tooling are basic next to Mailchimp or Klaviyo, so anything visually ambitious means hand-written HTML email.
- You own the server: PHP upgrades, database backups and patching are yours, and an unmaintained Sendy install holding a subscriber list is a data breach waiting to happen.
Cross-shopped
What people choose instead of Sendy
Each pairing was judged by two reviewers asking whether a buyer would genuinely weigh the two against each other. The ones that failed were deleted rather than published.
- SendyvsBrevo
Brevo: If you want to be billed by emails sent rather than subscribers stored but not run your own server
- SendyvsSendGrid
SendGrid: If you want a delivery API with deliverability support instead of raw SES
Pricing
What Sendy costs
Taken from the vendor's own pricing page. Prices move, so check before you buy.
Sendy licence
$69 /one-time
- One-time purchase, no subscription
- Free updates only up to the next major version
- Unlimited lists, subscribers and campaigns
- Requires your own PHP and MySQL hosting
- Delivery billed separately by Amazon SES at roughly $1 per 10,000 emails
- Refund offered if it does not work out
AI Assistant bundle
$39 /one-time
- Optional add-on, listed at a discount from $49
- AI writing assistance inside the campaign editor
Installation service
$79 /one-time
- Optional one-off setup by the vendor
- For buyers who do not want to configure hosting and SES themselves
Capabilities
Features
One-time licence
$69 single purchase rather than a monthly subscription
Amazon SES delivery
Sends through your own AWS account at SES rates
Multiple brands
Separate brands with their own lists, campaigns and client login
Autoresponders
Drip sequences triggered by signup or date
Segmentation
Conditional segments on subscriber fields and campaign behaviour
Bounce and complaint handling
Processes SES notifications to keep lists clean automatically
Reporting
Opens, clicks, bounces and complaints per campaign
Client access
Give a client login to their own brand, useful for agencies reselling sending
Answered, with sources
Questions people ask
Each answer names the page it came from, so you can check it rather than take our word for it.
What does it actually cost to send?
The licence is $69 once. Delivery is Amazon SES at roughly $1 per 10,000 emails, plus your own hosting, so a 50,000-contact weekly newsletter costs a few dollars a month to send.
Are updates free forever?
No. Updates are free up to the next major version, for example within 7.x. Moving from 7.x to 8.x is a paid upgrade.
Do I need to know how to set up a server?
Standard PHP and MySQL hosting is enough and the vendor compares it to installing WordPress, but the SES side needs AWS configuration. An $79 installation service is offered if you would rather not.
What happens if Amazon suspends my SES account?
Your sending stops until you resolve it with AWS. There is no alternative delivery route built in, and this is the single biggest operational risk of the model.
Keep looking
Where to go from Sendy
- Sendy alternativesEvery product people weigh against it
- Sendy pricingPlans, floors and what the tiers exclude
- Sendy badgesWhich rules it meets, and the figure behind each
- All Email Marketing softwareThe full category
- Best Email Marketing softwareThe shortlist, and how it was cut
Best Email Marketing software for
Compare Sendy with
- Brevo
- MailerLite
- SendGrid
- Listmonk
- Keila
- Amazon SES
- Moosend
- Campaign Monitor
- EmailOctopus
- Zoho Campaigns
- Attentive
- Dotdigital
- Loops
- Mailjet
- Ortto
- Listmonk
- Keila
- Moosend
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Pricing on request12 researched notes
Softwr does not host reviews and shows no star rating for Sendy, because a rating we did not collect is not ours to publish. What is here is the pricing and platform detail from the vendor’s own pages, limitations we could state concretely, and alternatives a reviewer confirmed people weigh against it. Tell us if any of it is wrong.
More on Sendy
Sendy alternatives
What people switch to, and what they give up
Sendy pricing
Every tier, and where the cost actually lands
Compare Sendy
Put it head to head with anything we hold
Sendy badge
Its rating, and an embed for your own site
Best Email Marketing software alternatives
Email marketing tool with a genuine free tier, priced by contact count once paid
Per month by contact tier once on a paid planEmail marketing platform priced by contact tier, with unlimited sends only from the mid tier up
Per month by contact tier and plan levelRaw transactional email infrastructure priced per thousand messages, with no campaign UI at all
Per 1,000 emails sent, tiered by volume, no campaign features includedSelf-hosted newsletter and mailing list manager that ships as a single Go binary
Open source, no licence feeLow-cost email marketing from 9 US dollars a month, owned by Sitecore since 2021
Per month by contact countAGPL newsletter tool from Germany, self-hostable or hosted in the EU with no free plan
Per month by emails sent