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Repo → github.com/knadh/listmonk

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Install → docker compose up -d · AGPL v3 · 22.2k stars

What's inside: the exact tool from the video — listmonk, the self-hosted newsletter and mailing list manager that replaces Mailchimp's $1,360/month Premium plan with one free binary running on your own computer or VPS.

What it is (straight)

listmonk is a standalone, self-hosted newsletter and mailing list manager. One Go binary plus a PostgreSQL database — that's the whole stack. It's built by Kailash Nadh (CTO of Zerodha, India's largest stock broker, which runs it in production), it has 22.2k stars on GitHub, and it's completely free and open source under AGPL v3. Mailchimp's Premium plan runs $1,360/month — this does the sending from your own machine, with no subscriber caps and no monthly send limits.

It's actively maintained too: v6.2.0 shipped in June 2026.

What you get: millions of subscribers across unlimited lists, campaigns with built-in analytics, a full REST API — and enough performance that a production instance sent a 7-million-email campaign on a fraction of one CPU core with 57 MB of peak RAM.

Honest caveats:

• listmonk manages and sends — but actual delivery goes through an SMTP provider you connect (Amazon SES, Mailgun, Brevo, or your own mail server). The software is free; high-volume sending through a provider can still carry its own (much smaller) cost.
• Deliverability is your job. Set up SPF, DKIM and DMARC on your sending domain or your newsletters land in spam — no self-hosted tool can skip this.
• It needs PostgreSQL. The official docker-compose ships one, so the Docker route handles it for you.
• AGPL v3 license: if you modify listmonk's code and host the modified version, you must open-source those changes. Running it as-is for your own newsletters — nothing to worry about.

Quick start (~10 min)

Docker (recommended) — commands verbatim from the official README:

# Download the compose file to the current directory.
curl -LO <https://github.com/knadh/listmonk/raw/master/docker-compose.yml>

# Run the services in the background.
docker compose up -d

Then visit http://localhost:9000.

Binary (no Docker) — from the official README:

1. Download the latest release and extract the listmonk binary.
2. ./listmonk --new-config to generate config.toml. Edit it.