MailCheap

MailCheap is a newsletter platform built around a simple pricing idea: you pay for the emails you actually send, not for every subscriber sitting on your list. Plans on the hosted MailCheap Cloud start at $19 a month for 20,000 emails, and the team positions it as up to 83% cheaper than beehiiv and roughly 75% cheaper than Mailchimp or Ghost.

What you can do

• Write, review and send. A slash-command editor handles headings, images and boxes, or you can push Markdown or full HTML through the REST API. A review step flags missing unsubscribe links, Gmail's 100 KB clipping limit, absent postal addresses and weak subject lines before anything goes out, and issues can be scheduled with send-time suggestions.
• Run it from an AI agent. Everything in the dashboard is also exposed through an MCP server. ChatGPT, Claude and Grok connect with OAuth; Claude Code, Codex and Cursor use an API key. Sending is marked as irreversible so agents ask for confirmation first.
• Move over from other tools. CSV exports from beehiiv, Substack and Mailchimp import as they are, keeping subscriber status and signup dates, as do exports from Kit, MailerLite, Buttondown, Ghost and EmailOctopus.
• Publish a website for each newsletter. Every issue gets a search-engine-friendly page with a signup form and share images, on a free mailcheap.ai subdomain or on your own server.
• Protect deliverability. Warm-up slices for new contacts, automatic cleanup of readers who ignore several issues, filtering of invalid and spam-trap addresses on import, DKIM/DMARC setup checks, one-click unsubscribe, confirmed opt-in and Google Postmaster monitoring are built in.

Hosted or self-hosted

The full app is published under AGPL-3.0. You can self-host it with your own Amazon SES (or PostShiba) account, MongoDB and Upstash QStash for background sending, paying only your provider's per-email rate, or use MailCheap Cloud, which runs the same code with open sign-up and billing. Each account can run up to three newsletters.