Why I built BYOMailer for Legendsverse.
I run Legendsverse, and I was tired of my email bill going up every time my list did. So I built BYOMailer on my own AWS SES account, where you pay to send email, not to store subscribers. It runs Legendsverse's production email today, and every number on this page is real and updated daily.
260,270
Emails delivered
98.97%
Deliverability
23.42%
Open rate
The numbers
Every metric, the full picture
Total Emails Sent
260,270
Deliverability Rate
98.97%
Open Rate
23.42%
Total Contacts
23,269
Sent Rate
92.1%
Bounce Rate
0.54%
Complaint Rate
0.02%
Newsletters Sent
29
Active Sequences
10
Contacts & Email Health
Since first contact
Emails Sent & Cost vs Kit
Since first contact · bars = emails sent, lines = monthly cost
The cost
What this costs on AWS
Amazon SES Cost
260,270 emails at $0.10/1,000
$26.03
Total SES spend to date
No SNS charges
BYOMailer uses Amazon SQS for event processing (bounces, complaints, deliveries). SQS includes 1M free requests/month, so there are effectively no additional charges beyond SES sending costs.
How much could you save?
Enter your contact count and see exactly what you'd pay with BYOMailer vs your current provider.
Calculate your savingsWhere it started
I needed email for Legendsverse. Every option wanted to bill me by the subscriber.
Legendsverse has a growing audience of collectors, and it needs email all the time: product updates, onboarding, retention nudges, billing reminders, community announcements. Sending once was never the hard part. The hard part was doing it forever, without watching the bill climb every time someone new signed up.
Why subscriber pricing bugged me
I am a developer, so I already knew Amazon SES could send those emails for almost nothing. Paying a traditional ESP a few hundred dollars a month to store contacts, most of whom open a handful of emails a year, felt backwards. And the bill grew every time I did. I wanted a cost tied to what I actually send, on infrastructure I own. Nothing on the market fit, so I built it.
So I built it
SES could send. It just could not do the marketing part. So I built that.
I use it in production every day
Legendsverse's entire email operation runs on BYOMailer now, sending through my own AWS SES account. I am the first user and the most demanding one: when something is slow, confusing, or broken, I hit it before anyone else does. It has sent 260,270 emails at 98.97% deliverability, and every one of them went to a real subscriber, not a test inbox I set up for a screenshot.
The comparison
What this would cost elsewhere
Based on 23,269 contacts on the Legendsverse list.
| Provider | Their Price | BYOMailer | You Save |
|---|---|---|---|
| MailchimpStandard | $288.70/mo | $49/mo | $239.70/mo (83%) |
| KitCreator | $199/mo | $49/mo | $150/mo (75%) |
| KlaviyoEmail | $400/mo | $49/mo | $351/mo (88%) |
| ActiveCampaignPro | $629/mo | $49/mo | $580/mo (92%) |
BYOMailer cost = $49/mo flat plan fee (SES usage billed separately by AWS at $0.10/1,000 emails). Provider prices from their public pricing pages.
Where it landed
A bill I can predict, and one I do not dread as the list grows.
Instead of a traditional ESP charging me by contact count, Legendsverse pays a flat BYOMailer fee plus whatever AWS bills for the actual sending. That is the whole invoice, and it barely moves as the list grows. I will be honest: BYOMailer is younger than the big ESPs and does not do everything they do. But for running lifecycle email on my own SES, it does exactly what I needed, which is why it is the tool I still reach for.
I built this for my own product first. If you run a SaaS with thousands of contacts and the same frustration, it might be exactly what you need too.
Want this setup for your SaaS?
We will help you move your contacts, tags, templates, sequences, automations, and SES event handling across. Whichever plan you land on.
Free to try. First 25,000 emails are on us, and we help you migrate on every plan.