What is the migration story off Mailchimp or SendGrid?

CSV import for contacts; HTML campaign templates paste in unchanged; automations rebuild in an afternoon. Plan a 1-week DNS + parallel-run window.

What about GDPR + EU data residency?

Self-hosted means you choose the host. EU-based hosting for EU customers, no third-party DPA needed. Amazon SES driver supports any region.

For SaaS founders & product teams

Email marketing that scales past your billing model.

Q: Can we run AcelleMail multi-tenant for our own customers?

Yes — the Customer + Plan model gates per-tenant sending volume. Bundled Stripe + PayPal + offline; everything else ships as a payment-gateway plugin.

Q: Does AcelleMail handle inbound webhooks for behavioural triggers?

Yes — fires customer_added / new_subscription / plan_changed / subscription_cancelled events. Custom event shapes ship as a plugin webhook controller.

Q: How does the one-time license interact with our billing for end customers?

License covers your install. End customers pay you. Customer + Plan model gates per-tenant volume. Margin is predictable because cost-per-send is constant.

Mailchimp at 10,000 contacts is around $135/month. AcelleMail at the same volume runs roughly $2/month in Amazon SES fees on top of a $74-$199 one-time license — the math diverges from your first paying customer onward and never converges. Self-hosted, REST-first, GDPR-friendly, and built for the lifecycle / transactional / behavioural-trigger flows SaaS products actually need.

Buy Standard License — $74 See the developer docs →

The math at SaaS-billing scale

Per-subscriber pricing punishes growth. One-time licensing rewards it.

Per-thousand-contact pricing is the dominant SaaS billing model for transactional email. It assumes the cost of a sent email scales linearly with list size — at the platform's fee schedule. AcelleMail breaks the scale by separating the software from the send: pay once for the software, then pay only Amazon SES (or any SMTP service) for actual emails. SES bills $0.10 per 1,000 emails. The cost of "5,000 contacts who get one email a week" is roughly $2 per month in send fees, plus the software you bought once.

Subscribers	Mailchimp Standard / mo	AcelleMail + SES / mo*	3-year saving
5,000	$100	~$2	~$3,500
10,000	$135	~$4	~$4,700
50,000	$385	~$20	~$13,000
200,000	$1,310	~$80	~$44,000

*Assumes one campaign per subscriber per week sent through Amazon SES at the standard $0.10/1,000 rate, plus $1-2/mo for a small DigitalOcean droplet running PHP-FPM. Mailchimp pricing as published 2026-05. License paid once; software updates included for life. Full comparison →

SaaS-shaped feature surface

Lifecycle. Transactional. Behavioural. The three flows SaaS actually ships.

Lifecycle drips

Onboarding day 0 → day 1 → day 7 → day 30. Trial expiry warnings. Upgrade nudges. Churn-rescue sequences. Built into the Automation tab; per-step delays measured in minutes or days; conditional branches off subscriber tags or webhook-driven custom fields.

Transactional via REST API

Token-authenticated POST /api/v1/lists/{uid}/subscribers from your app server adds a customer in milliseconds; POST /api/v1/automations/{uid}/start kicks off the right drip from the right event. Same API the plugins use — see the REST API reference.

Behavioural triggers

Custom fields keyed by your product's events (last login, plan, MRR contribution) flow through your CRM webhook into AcelleMail's contact attributes. Automations branch on those attributes; campaigns segment by them. Exactly the integration shape third-party CRMs already speak.

Per-customer plans (multi-tenant)

AcelleMail's customer + plan model lets a SaaS reseller (or your own multi-tenant product) gate sending volume per tenant — Free / Starter / Pro tiers, daily-quota enforcement, plan-change billing through the bundled Cashier package or a plugin gateway.

Deliverability tooling

DKIM / SPF / DMARC validation against the sending domain, IP-warmup pacing, bounce + complaint handling per provider. Amazon SES, SendGrid, Mailgun, Postmark, Postal — pick one or use multiple sending servers in rotation.

Data residency by default

Self-hosted means subscriber records, send history, and tracking pixels all live on infrastructure you control. EU-only hosting for EU customers, US-only for US customers — whatever the data-protection contract you signed with your customers requires. No third-party Data Processing Agreement to sign with the email vendor; you are the email vendor.

Built on what you already run

Laravel, MySQL, Redis. The stack your engineers already debug at 2am.

AcelleMail is a Laravel application. Your team already knows how to scale Laravel — the same horizontal-scaling rules apply (queue workers, Redis cache, MySQL read replicas). The plugin SDK is also vanilla Laravel: a sending driver, a payment gateway, a custom admin page, a cohort-specific report — all ship as drop-in plugins under your own namespace, no fork required. Eleven source-grounded developer docs walk every extension surface end-to-end.

Every claim above traces back to a file path in the codebase: the Hook system for plugin contracts, the plugin lifecycle for activate / deactivate semantics, the testing infrastructure for the per-plugin testsuite pattern. No black boxes, no aspirational APIs.

SaaS-specific FAQ

Real questions from SaaS teams.

Can we run AcelleMail multi-tenant for our own customers?

Yes. The Customer + Plan model is what bundles the per-tenant gating. Each of your end customers becomes a Customer row in AcelleMail; their sending limits, allowed campaign types, and feature access flow through the Plan they are on. Bundled Stripe + PayPal + offline gateways handle plan billing; everything else (Paddle, Razorpay, regional providers) is a one-class payment-gateway plugin.

What's the migration story off Mailchimp / SendGrid Marketing Campaigns?

CSV import for contacts; campaign-template HTML pastes in unchanged; automation flows are rebuilt manually but typically take an afternoon for a five-step onboarding sequence. The biggest unblocker is DNS — DKIM / SPF / DMARC for the sending domain, propagation 0-48h. Plan a one-week parallel-run window: send through both providers to a small cohort, compare deliverability, switch primary.

Does AcelleMail handle inbound webhooks for behavioural triggers?

Yes — the host fires customer_added, new_subscription, plan_changed, and subscription_cancelled events that plugins can listen to. For fully-custom event shapes from your own product, register a plugin that adds a webhook controller and pushes the event through to a POST /automations/{uid}/start call. Pattern lives in the Hook system deep-dive.

What about GDPR / Schrems II / EU data residency?

Self-hosted means you choose the host: an EU-based DigitalOcean droplet, AWS Frankfurt, Hetzner, your own colo, anywhere. Subscriber data and tracking pixels never leave that infrastructure. The bundled Amazon SES driver supports any SES region; switching from us-east-1 to eu-west-1 is one config field change. No third-party Data Processing Agreement to sign with the email vendor — you are the email vendor.

How does the one-time license interact with our billing for end customers?

The license covers your software install. Your end customers pay you (through whatever billing flow you build) for access to your service. AcelleMail's Customer + Plan model gates each end customer's monthly sending volume; you bill them for the volume tier you chose; you pay Amazon SES (or whichever sending vendor) for the actual sends. Margins are predictable because the cost-per-send is constant — no platform-fee inflection at any subscriber count.

Pay once. Own the email layer. Scale with your billing.

Standard License starts at $74. Extended adds commercial redistribution + the plugin SDK for $199. Lifetime updates. Try the live demo before you buy.

Get AcelleMail — $74 Try Live Demo