Mailcoach

Mailcoach is an email marketing platform built by Spatie, the company behind it, for "growing creators, developers, and businesses". It sends three kinds of email from one account: newsletters and marketing campaigns, automated drip sequences, and transactional emails triggered by your own application. It comes in two editions. The regular Mailcoach is a hosted service run by the company and priced by the number of emails you send. Mailcoach Self-Hosted is a Laravel package you install on your own server or build into your own Laravel application, bought as a license. Spatie explains the origin on the site: "Most of our products start from a desire to create high quality things for our own use." It says the aim with Mailcoach was a tool suited to bootstrappers, creators and developers, people much like its own team.

What a sender gets

Campaigns. The campaign side offers segmentation, split testing and analytics. You can test several versions of an email and send the most effective one, and the feature list promises "Extensive segmentation and tagging" for splitting an audience. Three editors are available: Markdown, HTML and a WYSIWYG visual editor. That choice matters in practice, because a developer writing a product changelog in Markdown and a marketer building a visual newsletter can both work in the same tool without one of them fighting the editor.

Automations. Workflows are described as suitable "for onboarding, generating leads, or anything else you have in mind", with no coding required. The site lists plenty of trigger and action options, lets you add emails or templates to an automation, and lets developers create any automation programmatically through the API. A drip sequence for new subscribers, an onboarding series for a SaaS trial or a lead-nurture flow all fit this model.

Transactional email. You can edit, send and track transactional emails directly in Mailcoach and trigger them from your application through the API. Opens and clicks are tracked on transactional messages too, templates and content can be managed in code, and you can add extra recipients to each email sent. For a small product team this puts the password reset, the receipt and the newsletter in one place, with one set of templates and one set of reports.

API. Mailcoach presents itself as developer-friendly, with an API reference that the site calls "Our extensive API documentation". A testimonial from a developer describes maintaining mailing lists automatically through the API, and another from a CTO describes a deep integration into a multi-tenant Laravel application.

Audiences without contact limits. On the hosted edition there is no contact ceiling: "you don't pay more each month if you have more contacts, you also have an unlimited size of your audience." The feature page makes the practical point that a large list rarely needs to be mailed in full every month, so you can segment it and save money by emailing a smaller group.

Resources. The site has a Learn Mailcoach help section, a public changelog, a blog, a service status page, and "Switch to Mailcoach" guides for moving from another platform. The footer links to GDPR, security and subprocessor pages, and a solutions page is aimed at EU businesses.

Pricing on the hosted edition

The hosted edition starts at €9.99 per month and is billed by emails sent rather than by contacts. The unlimited-contacts page gives the one concrete threshold: if you send fewer than 2,000 emails a month, you pay only the base fee of €9.99 a month, and emails above that are charged as extras, which the company says cost less than most other platforms charge monthly. The site also claims that charging per sent email rather than per contact saves customers "between €200 and €1,000/month as your contact list grows".

A 14-day free trial needs no credit card.

Mailcoach Self-Hosted

The self-hosted edition has the "Same great features as Mailcoach": campaigns with split tests, segmentation and tagging and the three editors; automations with triggers, actions and API control; and transactional sending with tracked opens and clicks. There are two ways to run it. You can run it as a standalone application if you have basic PHP knowledge and can deploy to a server, even without knowing Laravel, or you can install it as a package inside an existing Laravel application, where "Anything that can be done via the Mailcoach UI, can also be done via code."

Self-hosted sending needs your own email provider. The page names the supported ones: Postmark, Resend, Amazon SES, Mailgun, Sendgrid or Brevo. Your provider bills delivery, and Mailcoach supplies the software.

Licenses are bought through spatie.be and come in two types:

• Single domain. Valid for one domain or subdomain, suited to running Mailcoach standalone, with the package, the API and 1 year of free updates, no subscription.
• Unlimited domains. No domain restrictions, and it may be integrated into your own products. The FAQ says you can then build Mailcoach into an application of your own, as long as your primary product is not email marketing.

The license fee buys a year of updates. After that you can renew whenever you like, or keep using the version you have: "If you're satisfied with the current version at that point, you can use Mailcoach forever." Refunds come with "a 10 day money-back guarantee". Support is limited on this edition. The FAQ says "We try to help where we can, but we cannot provide support for every custom installation," and points anyone who wants support included to the hosted service.

Who it suits

Mailcoach fits developers and technical creators first. A newsletter writer who likes Markdown, a Laravel shop that wants email inside its own product, and a SaaS startup that needs marketing and transactional email from one API are the readers the site speaks to, and the testimonials come largely from the PHP and Laravel community. Senders with a big list they mail selectively benefit from the per-email pricing and unlimited audience, and a small sender under 2,000 emails a month pays only the €9.99 base fee.

The self-hosted license suits a team that wants the software on its own infrastructure, or a company building email features into its product under the Unlimited domains license. The trade-off is that you manage the server and the email provider account yourself and get only best-effort support. A marketing team with no developer on hand will be more comfortable on the hosted edition.