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Postal: the self-hosted SendGrid alternative.

Open-source mail platform combining an outbound MTA with ESP-style features: HTTP API, click and open tracking, webhook event delivery, bounce processing. Free under MIT license. We deploy it on dedicated bare metal, manage updates and authentication, and hand you root access. You own the infrastructure, we run it.

See plans → Postal wiki
why postal

What Postal gives you that PowerMTA does not.

PowerMTA is a pure outbound MTA — extremely fast, but you build the user-facing layer separately. Postal includes the ESP feature set out of the box. Trade-off: moderate throughput vs PowerMTA extreme scale, in exchange for zero license fees and integrated functionality.

HTTP API for sending

Drop-in replacement for SendGrid and Mailgun API patterns. Application code migrates with minimal changes — most clients change only the base URL and auth header.

Click & open tracking built-in

No MailWizz or external tracking required. The tracking infrastructure is part of Postal itself, configured per-organization for clean data isolation.

Webhook event delivery

Bounce events, delivery events, complaint events delivered to your application endpoints in real time. Signed payloads, automatic retry on failure.

Multi-organization architecture

Serve multiple end-clients from one Postal instance with proper account isolation. Useful for ESP resellers and agencies serving multiple clients.

Zero license fees

Postal is MIT-licensed. You pay for hosting and operational management, not software. Versus PowerMTA €2K-10K+ annual license tiers.

Open codebase, auditable

Ruby on Rails. Customizations and debugging available at source level. No vendor lock-in. Security-sensitive operations can audit the code.

three configurations · three capacity tiers

Postal bundled with the right hardware for your volume.

Same hardware tiers as our dedicated server fleet (E3, E5, EPYC) sized to Postal workload characteristics. Each plan includes the MIT-licensed Postal installation, SPF/DKIM/DMARC configuration, IP warmup coordination, and ongoing operational support.

up to 1M sends/month

Postal Iron-E3

€159 / month
+ €499 one-time setup
  • CPU. Intel Xeon E3-1245v6 (4c/8t)
  • RAM. 32 GB DDR4 ECC
  • Storage. 2 × 1 TB NVMe RAID-1
  • Network. 30 TB / 1 Gbps
  • Capacity. 1M monthly
  • Postal latest stable (MIT license)
  • SPF, DKIM 2048-bit, DMARC, PTR configured
  • IP warmup coordination (30-45 days)
  • HTTP API + SMTP submission ready
  • Click/open tracking enabled
  • Webhook event delivery configured
  • Native bounce processing + suppression
  • 1 IPv4 + IPv6 /64, custom rDNS
  • IPMI v2 access through our VPN
  • Daily backups, engineer-direct support
Order on Telegram →
most chosen up to 5M sends/month

Postal Iron-E5

€249 / month
+ €499 one-time setup
  • CPU. Intel Xeon E5-2680v4 (14c/28t)
  • RAM. 64 GB DDR4 ECC
  • Storage. 2 × 2 TB NVMe RAID-1
  • Network. unmetered / 1 Gbps
  • Capacity. 5M monthly
  • Postal latest stable (MIT license)
  • SPF, DKIM 2048-bit, DMARC, PTR configured
  • IP warmup coordination (30-45 days)
  • HTTP API + SMTP submission ready
  • Click/open tracking enabled
  • Webhook event delivery configured
  • Native bounce processing + suppression
  • 1 IPv4 + IPv6 /64, custom rDNS
  • IPMI v2 access through our VPN
  • Daily backups, engineer-direct support
Order on Telegram →
up to 25M sends/month

Postal Iron-EPYC

€379 / month
+ €499 one-time setup
  • CPU. AMD EPYC 7402P (24c/48t)
  • RAM. 128 GB DDR4 ECC
  • Storage. 2 × 4 TB NVMe RAID-1
  • Network. unmetered / 10 Gbps
  • Capacity. 25M monthly
  • Postal latest stable (MIT license)
  • SPF, DKIM 2048-bit, DMARC, PTR configured
  • IP warmup coordination (30-45 days)
  • HTTP API + SMTP submission ready
  • Click/open tracking enabled
  • Webhook event delivery configured
  • Native bounce processing + suppression
  • 1 IPv4 + IPv6 /64, custom rDNS
  • IPMI v2 access through our VPN
  • Daily backups, engineer-direct support
Order on Telegram →

Capacity figures assume mixed receiver traffic (60% Gmail and Yahoo, 30% Microsoft, 10% other), reasonable list quality, and per-receiver throttling tuned to standard thresholds. Pure transactional traffic to a single receiver category reaches significantly higher numbers. Volume planning is part of onboarding and we revise the capacity model based on your actual sending mix during the first 30 days.

economics

How this compares to commercial alternatives.

For a sender doing 5M monthly messages, indicative monthly cost comparison. The crossover threshold below which commercial ESPs make sense is roughly 250-500K monthly messages depending on use case.

SendGrid Pro

Approximately €600-1,200 per month depending on volume tier and add-ons.

Mailgun Foundation

Approximately €700-1,400 per month at this volume.

Postmark

Approximately €1,000-1,500 per month at this volume. Their pricing is volume-aggressive at the high end.

Amazon SES + your ops

About €50 in SES fees plus your operational time and AWS infrastructure costs (typically several hundred euros equivalent in real terms).

Our managed Postal hosting

€249 per month all-in for the Iron-E5 tier handling up to 5M monthly messages. Setup fee €499 one-time. No volume-based pricing escalation.

At 10M monthly

Commercial ESPs charge €1,500-3,000+ per month while Postal hosting at the Iron-E5 tier is unchanged at €249.

setup timeline

From order to production-ready sending.

Standard timeline from order to full production volume. We coordinate with your team at each phase; IP warmup is the longest phase but cannot be safely compressed without burning sender reputation.

Day 0

Order confirmation, payment received, customer portal account opened.

Day 1-2

Server provisioning. Hardware allocated, base OS installed, IPMI access configured through our VPN.

Day 3-5

Postal stack installation. Ruby on Rails, MariaDB, RabbitMQ. Admin credentials delivered via secure channel.

Day 5-7

Authentication infrastructure. SPF, DKIM, DMARC, PTR for your sending domains. DNS coordination if needed.

Day 7-14

Initial low-volume sending. Smoke tests, deliverability baseline, monitoring setup verification.

Day 14-45

IP warmup. Volume ramped up gradually. Reputation monitoring at Gmail, Outlook, Yahoo, Apple. Adjustments based on observed patterns.

fit assessment

When Postal fits, when it doesn't.

We do not push Postal on every customer. The right answer depends on volume, use case, technical capability, and budget. Honest assessment of where Postal works and where alternatives are better.

Good fit: SaaS migrating from SendGrid

HTTP API patterns transfer cleanly. Code that calls SendGrid today can call Postal tomorrow with minimal modification.

Good fit: ESP resellers (5-50 clients)

Postal multi-organization architecture supports this model natively. Proper account isolation between end-clients.

Good fit: 500K-25M monthly messages

Above commercial ESP cost threshold. Below the point where PowerMTA's scale optimization becomes necessary.

Not the best fit: 50M+ monthly

Possible with Postal, but PowerMTA fits this scale better. See our PowerMTA vs Postal comparison.

Not the best fit: Marketing UI primary

Postal is API-driven. Operators whose end-users send via a UI rather than via code benefit from MailWizz or Acelle on top.

Not the best fit: No dev capability

Postal is Ruby on Rails. Debugging benefits from Ruby familiarity. Operations without code capability are better served by commercial SaaS.

Ready to deploy?

Order takes 5 minutes. Server provisioning 24-48 hours. Authentication setup and basic warmup the week following. Production-ready in 30-45 days depending on your warmup schedule.

Order on Telegram → Read the wiki first