Postal

Postal is a self-hosted mail server designed as an open-source alternative to SendGrid or Mailgun. Handles outbound and inbound, RESTful API, multi-domain. Operationally heavier than just running Postfix.

At an early stage the deciding factors are what the free tier actually covers, what the first paid invoice looks like, and how much of a founding engineer's week the setup costs. Feature depth that only matters at a million sends a month is noise until it is not.

Against a waitlist, a launch announcement, onboarding email, and the first transactional sends, Postal covers developer experience, SDK breadth, and webhook coverage, and does not cover scheduling. Whether that gap matters depends on how central those are to the build.

• Free tier: Free, self-hosted
• Best published rate per 1,000: Tiers not published in comparable form
• Starts at: Self-hosted only
• DX score: 6/10
• Deliverability: You own it. Reputation depends on your IP, warmup discipline, and authentication.
• Operating since: Not published
• Scheduling: No
• SDKs: node, ruby, php
• Webhooks: Yes

You own it. Reputation depends on your IP, warmup discipline, and authentication.

Teams with infra ops capacity that want full control of their mail delivery.