Independent Publishing Infrastructure
Own your audience.
Stop renting it.
Every newsletter platform charges you more as your list grows — for exactly the same email. We host the press: Listmonk, DKIM, SPF and DMARC configured for you, one flat price, and a subscriber database you can export on any Tuesday you like.
Every newsletter platform you have ever used runs the same trick. Sign up free, grow your list, and watch the invoice grow with it — not because sending email got more expensive, but because they have priced the relationship, not the service. A subscriber costs the same fraction of a cent to email whether your list is 500 people or 500,000. What changes is what they charge you for the privilege of having grown. This is a printing press with your name on the plate instead: the same list, a flat price, and a database that is yours to walk out with.
The subscriber tax, explained
Per-subscriber pricing is not a pricing model, it is a growth tax. It is invisible at 500 subscribers and brutal at 25,000 — the exact point where a newsletter stops being a hobby and starts being a small publication with a real audience. That is precisely the point at which the platform decides you should pay for succeeding.
The meter above runs the same numbers the calculator below runs — nothing here is a mocked-up chart. At 25,000 subscribers, per-subscriber pricing has already crossed the point where a flat, managed alternative pays for itself many times over.
The Newsletter Tax Calculator
Move the slider to your list size. Watch the invoice.
Logarithmic scale from 500 to 250,000 subscribers. Type an exact number in the box, or drag the slider.
| Platform | Per year | |
|---|---|---|
| Mailchimp | ||
| Kit (ConvertKit) | ||
| Substack (10% of revenue) | ||
| ◀ | newsletters.hosting (flat) |
At 75,000 subscribers you would pay €0 a year for the privilege of having an audience.
Flat here: €228/yr. The difference buys a laptop every year.
How we calculate this
Mailchimp & Kit: figures are read from a table of publicly listed self-serve plan prices at nine subscriber-count breakpoints (500 to 250,000), sampled from each provider's own pricing page in July 2026, then interpolated on a logarithmic curve between breakpoints. Providers change list pricing often, run regional and promotional variations, and add paid add-ons — treat these as directional anchors, not live quotes. Check the provider's own pricing page for an exact number.
Sends per month: Mailchimp bundles a monthly send allowance roughly proportional to contact count; sending well beyond it requires extra pay-as-you-go credits, modelled here as a multiplier (0.85× at 1 send/month, up to 1.6× at 20). Kit and Substack do not meter sends, so their figures do not change with this control.
Substack: 10% of monthly paid-subscription revenue × 12, Substack's own long-standing, publicly documented take rate on paid subscriptions. Payment-processor fees (typically handled via Stripe, roughly 2.9% + a fixed fee) are not included — this is Substack's platform cut only. A newsletter with no paid subscriptions costs €0 on Substack.
newsletters.hosting: a flat €19/month anchor, unaffected by subscriber count, send frequency, or revenue — that flatness is the entire point of this page. Current, exact plan pricing lives on /products/, not on this landing page.
What you actually get
No dashboards designed to nudge you into a bigger plan. No feature you need locked two tiers up. Just the press, running.
- 01Listmonk — a mature, open-source newsletter and mailing-list manager, self-hosted on infrastructure we run and patch for you.
- 02Unlimited sends — no per-email metering, no monthly send allowance to watch, no overage credits to buy.
- 03Your own database — a plain Postgres instance underneath, exportable as CSV or a full dump, any time, no ticket required.
- 04One flat price — from €19/month regardless of list size. See exact current plans at /products/.
“You already own the list. The database should agree.”
Deliverability
Deliverability is not a feature you switch on. It is a set of records and habits, configured correctly once and then maintained. We do the configuring; you write the newsletter.
| Control | What we do |
|---|---|
| SPF | Configured on your sending domain before your first campaign, so receiving mail servers can verify we are allowed to send on your behalf. |
| DKIM | Per-domain signing keys set up and rotated; every campaign is cryptographically signed. |
| DMARC | A policy record configured for your domain, moved from monitoring to enforcement as your setup proves stable. |
| Warm-up | A short, honest send-volume ramp for new domains and large migrated lists, so mailbox providers see a trustworthy pattern from day one. |
| Bounce handling | Hard bounces are processed and removed automatically; you don't keep mailing addresses that don't exist. |
| Suppression lists | Unsubscribes and complaints are suppressed permanently across campaigns, protecting your sender reputation. |
Migration
Bring your CSV, keep your list. Every platform in the calculator above lets you export your subscribers as a CSV file — email addresses, names, consent dates, tags. We import that file into Listmonk with those fields intact, so your subscription history and opt-in records travel with the list, not just the addresses.
We do not scrape, buy, or cold-add anyone. Only the people who already said yes to you come across. If a list has been dormant for years, we will flag it and suggest a re-permission send rather than quietly reactivating stale addresses — that is the kind of thing that wrecks deliverability, and it is not worth the risk to your sender reputation.
Frequently asked
What does “flat” actually mean here?
One monthly hosting price, independent of how many subscribers are on your list or how many campaigns you send. Plans start from an anchor price of €19/month — exact current plans and specs are only accurate on the live order page, so that's where the real numbers live: /products/.
What are you actually hosting?
Listmonk — a mature, open-source, self-hosted newsletter and mailing list manager — running on infrastructure we operate and patch. The subscriber database underneath it is a plain Postgres database that is yours: exportable as CSV or a full database dump, any time you like, no ticket required.
Will my deliverability get worse if I leave Mailchimp or Kit?
Not because of the move itself. We configure SPF, DKIM and DMARC correctly on your sending domain before you send a single campaign, handle bounce processing and suppression lists automatically, and give you a short warm-up plan for the first sends from a new domain. Inbox placement still depends on your content and list hygiene — nobody can promise the inbox tab, on any platform.
How do I move my existing list over?
Export your subscriber list as CSV from Mailchimp, Kit or Substack — every platform offers this — and import it into Listmonk with your existing consent and subscription-date fields intact. We don't scrape, buy or cold-add anyone; only subscribers who already opted in with your old provider come across.
What happens when my list grows to 50,000 or 250,000 subscribers?
The price stays flat. If a list gets large enough to need materially more server resources, that's a conversation on /tickets/new/ or a plan change on /products/ — not an automatic per-subscriber surcharge that appears on your invoice the day you cross a threshold, which is how the platforms in the calculator above handle it.
Do you take a cut of my revenue, like Substack does?
No. Flat hosting fee only. If you run paid subscriptions through your own payment processor, that revenue is between you and your readers — we never see it, meter it, or take a percentage of it.