Overview

Mailcoach is an email marketing platform built by Spatie, the Belgian software company behind many well-known Laravel packages. It handles campaigns, marketing automations and transactional email from one interface, and can either be used as a hosted service (from €9.99 per month) or run on your own server as Mailcoach Self-Hosted inside a Laravel application. It is a commercial product rather than an open source project: the self-hosted edition is sold as a paid licence, and the source repository carries no open source licence.

Key Features

• Campaigns: Marketing email with segmentation, tagging, split testing and open/click analytics
• Automations: No-code workflows for onboarding, lead generation and drip sequences, with API-driven automations
• Transactional email: Edit, send and track one-off emails through the API, with templates managed in code
• Multiple editors: Markdown, raw HTML or a WYSIWYG editor
• Unlimited contacts: Pricing is by emails sent, not by list size
• Bring your own provider: Postmark, Resend, Amazon SES, Mailgun, Sendgrid, Brevo or a plain SMTP server
• Pre-send checklists: Catch broken links and missing content before a campaign goes out
• Newsletter archive: Publish a searchable archive of past newsletters on your site
• Laravel integration: Installable as a package, so anything doable in the UI can also be done in code
• EU hosting and GDPR tooling: Data stored in the EU with optional tracking

Why Use It

Mailcoach is aimed at developers and creators who want email marketing that behaves like a well-made software component rather than a marketing suite. Its commercial model is unusual: rather than charging per contact as Mailchimp and ActiveCampaign do, it charges per email sent, which keeps costs flat as a list grows. For Laravel teams the self-hosted licence is the attraction — you get the full application on your own infrastructure, integrated with your existing application, with a year of updates included. Be aware that it is not free software: the self-hosted edition requires a purchased licence from spatie.be and there is no gratis self-hosted tier. If you want a no-cost, fully open source alternative, Listmonk or Keila cover much of the same ground.

Use Cases

• Laravel applications that need marketing campaigns and transactional email built into the product
• Creators and small businesses wanting EU-hosted email marketing billed by volume rather than list size
• Teams replacing per-contact SaaS pricing with a predictable per-email model
• Developers who want to manage templates, audiences and automations in code as well as through a UI

Platforms

Hosted SaaS (EU infrastructure), or self-hosted as a standalone PHP/Laravel application or an integrated Laravel package.

Licence

Proprietary / commercial — Mailcoach Self-Hosted requires a paid licence purchased from spatie.be; hosted plans start at €9.99 per month (2,000 emails included). Not open source.

Website

https://www.mailcoach.app/

Alternatives

• Listmonk — free, self-hosted newsletter and mailing list manager (AGPL-3.0)
• Keila — 100% open source newsletter tool with privacy-first analytics (AGPL-3.0)
• Mautic — open source marketing automation platform (GPL-3.0)
• Browse all self-hosted tools — the full TWiF directory