4.7k stars · AGPL-3.0 · v1.9.8 (2026-08-30)
Self-hosted alternative to Resend, SendGrid and Postmark — the sending layer Listmonk and Mautic both assume.
▶Repo detailsthe review · specs · pros & cons · install
What it is
useSend is a self-hosted alternative to paid email services such as Resend, SendGrid and Postmark. It gives your app a simple way to ask for an email to be sent, and it hands the message to Amazon SES for delivery while keeping the record of it on your own server.What it is good for. Anyone whose product sends email to individual people, as opposed to a newsletter to a list. Edition 2 recommended Listmonk and Edition 10 recommended Mautic, and both of those write email but assume you already have something that delivers it. Edition 15 recommended Postal, which is the heavier answer: your own full mail server, and a request to Hetzner to unblock the outgoing mail port. useSend is the lighter answer, because Amazon does the delivering. Grasppy will need password resets and signup confirmations before it needs a newsletter.
- Sending through Amazon SES costs about ten cents per thousand emails, far below the usual monthly plans.
- You keep the record of every message on your own server, including whether it arrived and whether it bounced.
- It has a normal web interface plus a programming interface, so you are not reading a database by hand.
- It is licensed AGPL-3.0. Running it for your own business is fine. Building it into a product you sell means reading that licence carefully first.
- It depends on Amazon SES, and getting an SES account out of Amazon's restricted starting mode takes a short application.
- Email delivery still needs the boring domain settings done correctly. Edition 8's checkdmarc is the tool that tells you whether you got them right.
mkdir -p ~/usesend && cd ~/usesend curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/usesend/useSend/main/docker-compose.yml -o docker-compose.yml # Read the file, then set your own values in an .env beside it: # DATABASE_URL, NEXTAUTH_SECRET, AWS_ACCESS_KEY, AWS_SECRET_KEY, AWS_DEFAULT_REGION docker compose up -d
