Email Marketing Without the Monthly SaaS Bill
Mailchimp, ConvertKit, and ActiveCampaign are convenient — but you are renting infrastructure you could own. Dada Mail and AWS SES give you the same capability for a fraction of the cost.
The problem with SaaS email platforms
You pay per subscriber, forever
Most email marketing platforms charge by list size. The more your audience grows, the more you pay — every single month, whether you send that month or not. That is a tax on success.
| Platform | 1,000 subscribers | 10,000 subscribers | 50,000 subscribers |
|---|
| Mailchimp | ~$13/mo | ~$100/mo | ~$350/mo |
| ConvertKit | ~$25/mo | ~$100/mo | ~$366/mo |
| ActiveCampaign | ~$15/mo | ~$70/mo | ~$187/mo |
| Dada Mail + AWS SES | ~$1/mo | ~$2/mo | ~$6/mo |
The SES cost is purely per email sent — $0.10 per 1,000 emails. If you send one campaign a month to 50,000 subscribers, that is $5. The Dada Mail server runs on infrastructure you likely already pay for.
The stack
Two pieces of software, one small AWS bill
Dada Mail
Open-source mailing list manager. Runs on your own server. Handles subscriptions, unsubscribes, bounce processing, list management, campaigns, archives, and a web-based admin panel. Active project — version 11 is current.
Free
Recommended: Pro Dada lifetime membership — $300 once
The free version of Dada Mail caps you at 3 lists and 100 subscribers each. The
Pro Dada lifetime membership removes all limits, adds the full manual, and gives you direct prioritised support for the life of the project — which has been running for 15+ years. At $300 once versus $150/year for the annual plan, you break even in two years. Against any SaaS platform the maths is not even close.
AWS Simple Email Service (SES)
Amazon's email sending infrastructure. High deliverability, dedicated IPs available, handles DKIM and SPF automatically. Used by large senders to avoid the spam folder. No monthly fee — you pay only per email sent.
$0.10 / 1k emails
A VPS or EC2 instance
Dada Mail runs on a standard Linux server — Apache or nginx, Perl, and MySQL. A $6–12/month VPS is enough for most lists. If you are already running a server for other things, the marginal cost is close to zero.
Already paying
Total monthly cost for 50,000 subscribers, one campaign per month:
AWS SES: $5 · Dada Mail: free · Server: already running = ~$5/month vs $187–350/month on SaaS.
What Dada Mail handles
It covers the full lifecycle
Subscription forms. Embeddable HTML forms with double opt-in confirmation. Drop them on any page — no third-party JavaScript required.
Unsubscribes and bounces. One-click unsubscribe links in every email. Bounce handling automatically removes bad addresses to protect your sender reputation.
Campaigns. HTML and plain-text email editor, scheduling, list segmentation, and mass mailing with rate limiting to stay within SES sending quotas.
Tracking. Open rates and click tracking built in. Not as polished as Mailchimp's dashboard, but the data is there.
Archives. Every campaign stored and searchable. Public or private archive pages you can link to from your website.
Your data stays yours. Subscriber lists live in your own MySQL database. No vendor lock-in, no export limits, no platform deciding to change pricing or shut down.
Getting set up
The five-step process
1
Get SES out of sandbox mode
New AWS SES accounts start in sandbox mode — you can only send to verified email addresses. Request production access through the AWS console. Approval typically takes 24 hours. You will need to describe your use case and confirm you handle unsubscribes correctly.
2
Verify your sending domain in SES
Add the DKIM DNS records AWS gives you to your domain. This tells receiving mail servers that your emails are legitimately from your domain. SES walks you through this step-by-step.
3
Install Dada Mail on your server
Download from
dadamailproject.com. The installer is a Perl CGI script. You need Apache or nginx with Perl and MySQL. The installer creates the database tables, sets file permissions, and walks you through the initial configuration. Takes 20–30 minutes.
4
Configure Dada Mail to use SES as its sending method
In the Dada Mail config file, set the sending method to Amazon SES and enter your SES SMTP credentials. Dada Mail then routes all outgoing email through SES instead of your local mail server — giving you SES deliverability without changing anything else.
5
Set up bounce handling
SES can route bounce and complaint notifications to an SNS topic or SQS queue. Dada Mail has a built-in bounce handler that processes these automatically. This step is important — ignoring bounces will damage your sender reputation and eventually get your SES account flagged.
Deliverability
SES gets you into the inbox
The main reason people pay for Mailchimp is deliverability — the confidence that emails actually land in the inbox rather than spam. SES gives you the same infrastructure. Amazon's IP reputation is excellent. With proper DKIM, SPF, and DMARC records in place, deliverability from SES is comparable to any major ESP.
The one thing to watch: your sending reputation is your own to protect. SaaS platforms quarantine bad senders automatically. On SES, if you send to stale lists or ignore bounces, your account reputation suffers and Amazon will pause your sending. Keep your list clean, handle bounces, and honour unsubscribes immediately. If you have a legacy list with unknown quality, ask Claude or Codex to write you a script that pulls your bounce and complaint data directly from SES and removes the bad addresses from your Dada Mail subscriber database in one pass — it is a straightforward task for any AI coding assistant and takes less than an hour to set up.
Honest limitations
When SaaS is still worth it
Non-technical users. Dada Mail requires a server, Perl, MySQL, and some comfort with config files. If you want a polished drag-and-drop experience with zero setup, Mailchimp is still easier to start with.
Advanced automation. ConvertKit and ActiveCampaign have sophisticated visual automation builders — sequences, tagging, conditional flows. Dada Mail's automation is more basic. If complex drip sequences are central to your business, that is a real gap.
Very small lists just starting out. Below 1,000 subscribers, Mailchimp's free tier costs nothing and the setup time for self-hosting is not justified. The economics only clearly favour self-hosting as your list grows.
The bottom line
If you are running a serious content business, a niche site, an e-commerce store, or any project where email is a core channel — and you are comfortable with a server — the self-hosted stack saves hundreds or thousands of pounds per year with no meaningful loss of capability.
The SaaS platforms are charging for convenience and polish. The underlying sending infrastructure (which is what actually matters for deliverability) is available directly from AWS for pennies.
Dada Mail is free, open-source, and actively maintained. AWS SES charges $0.10 per 1,000 emails. A list of 100,000 subscribers receiving a weekly email costs roughly $40/month in SES fees. The equivalent on a SaaS platform would be $500–1,000/month.
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