Notifuse

What Notifuse is

Notifuse is a newsletter and notification platform for sending broadcasts, automated sequences and transactional email, which you either run yourself or use as a managed service. The homepage describes it as "a modern, self-hosted emailing platform that allows you to send newsletters and transactional emails at a fraction of the cost", and the footer calls it "The open-source newsletter and notification platform that empowers teams to create, send, and track communications at scale." It is aimed at developers and product teams that need an email API, at marketers running newsletters, and at agencies and multi-brand companies that need separate workspaces. The pricing page states the model plainly: "Both send unlimited email through your own provider. Neither charges per email, per contact or per seat." The site is available in English and French.

Building and sending email

The visual email builder is drag-and-drop and, according to the homepage, lets you "Build responsive layouts with MJML components and real-time preview." Personalization uses Liquid templating variables such as {{ contact.first_name }} and custom fields for dynamic content. An S3 file manager handles images and attachments with S3-compatible storage and CDN delivery, and a live demo of the email editor is linked from every page, so you can try the builder before installing anything.

Newsletters can be tested with built-in A/B testing "for subject lines, content, and send times". Opens and clicks are tracked in real time, with open rates, click tracking and engagement metrics for each campaign. A notification center gives contacts a self-service portal to manage subscriptions, preferences and communication settings, which is where unsubscribes and list choices live.

For developers, the transactional side is a REST API: the homepage describes a "Powerful REST API for transactional emails with responsive templates for perfect rendering across all devices" and shows a sample call to a transactional.send endpoint with a bearer token. An API reference and documentation are linked in the footer.

Contacts, segments and automation

Each contact has a profile with custom fields and a timeline of activity: messages, web sessions and page views, profile changes, webhook events and subscription list changes. Segmentation works in real time: you can "Segment contacts by property, activity, and subscription" and build dynamic rules with relative dates.

Automations are event-driven workflows built on that contact timeline. A visual workflow builder combines trigger emails, wait periods, conditions and A/B tests in multi-step flows, and the homepage names welcome series, onboarding and re-engagement campaigns as typical uses. One detail stands out: a sequence can "automatically stop the sequence the moment a contact replies, so you never email someone who already responded."

Workspaces, permissions and agencies

Notifuse is multi-tenant. The homepage says: "Each workspace has isolated data, contacts, and campaigns. Perfect for agencies." Workspaces support custom sending domains, so an agency can run one store's email from one domain and another store's from another. Permissions are granular at workspace level, granting read or write access by feature such as contacts or broadcasts. On Notifuse Cloud both come with every plan; on a self-hosted install, three workspaces are included and editing a restricted permission set needs a license key.

AI assistant and web analytics

The homepage describes an AI assistant that works across the product: it writes emails and subject lines in the editor, drafts blog posts with their SEO metadata, and answers questions about which campaigns worked. It is "Bring your own key", using Anthropic, OpenAI or Gemini, and adding Firecrawl lets it research the web before writing. A web analytics module is "Cookieless by design: no cookie, no consent banner", ranks traffic sources by a measure it calls TimeScore, annotates each broadcast on the chart, and records goals with a value so revenue by channel can feed segments and automations.

Self-hosted pricing and the license

The self-hosted pricing page says: "Free to run in production. Notifuse never charges per email, per contact or per seat." There are four tiers:

• Free: $0, no key needed, for one team, with 3 workspaces.
• Studio: $290 per year, for a company and its brands, with 5 workspaces, granular permissions, Amazon SES tenant isolation and template translations.
• Agency: $890 per year, for an agency and its clients, with 15 workspaces and the same features.
• Enterprise: $1990 per year, for SSO and compliance requirements, adding single sign-on (OIDC) and audit logs.

One key covers one deployment, meaning one PostgreSQL database however many API containers run, and a custom license is available on request. The page offers a "14-day refund, no questions asked"; the key issued at purchase is valid for 30 days and the one-year key is emailed once the refund period has passed.

Six capabilities need a key: more than three workspaces, granular permissions, Amazon SES tenant isolation, template translations, single sign-on through OpenID Connect, and audit logs. The page is careful about what a missing key does: it refuses one action at the moment you take it, and "The send path contains no licence check of any kind", so scheduled broadcasts, transactional email, webhooks and API keys keep working with no key at all. An expired key keeps granting what it granted for a further 30 days. Key verification is offline, with "no phone-home".

The page also lists what a license never covers: no per-email fee or sending cap, unlimited contacts and timeline events with no retention expiry when self-hosting, unlimited team members, three workspaces on every installation each with its own isolated PostgreSQL database, and full read and export of your data at any time. Any change to that list carries 90 days' notice. On licensing, every release is published under BSL 1.1 and becomes AGPL-3.0 four years later, and you may host Notifuse for others and charge for it as long as you do not use the six keyed capabilities without a key.

Notifuse Cloud

Notifuse Cloud starts "From $16 /month", billed monthly or yearly. The pricing page lists a PostgreSQL server dedicated to your deployment with a separate database per workspace, daily backups with point-in-time recovery, "Hosted in the EU, GDPR compliant", every capability on every plan, and nothing to maintain, patch or monitor. You can move between Cloud and self-hosting in either direction because, the page says, the data export is complete and the software is the same.

Support

The homepage splits support by deployment: Notifuse Cloud gets priority email support on all paid plans, and self-hosted users get community support via GitHub Issues.

Who Notifuse suits

Notifuse suits a SaaS team that wants transactional email and product newsletters in one tool without per-contact pricing, an agency or multi-brand company that needs isolated workspaces with their own domains, and an organization that wants its data on its own servers or on EU-hosted Cloud. Because both options send through your own provider, it also suits a team already using Amazon SES that wants a full interface on top.

It suits less well a small business that wants sending, deliverability and a mail provider bundled in one account, since connecting and running that provider is part of the job. A self-hosted install also needs someone to operate the server and its PostgreSQL database.