Sendora is an email marketing platform sold once as source code. You deploy it under your own brand and run it as a multi-tenant SaaS: every client is an isolated tenant with their own contacts, their own verified sending domain and their own plan limits, and you decide what each of them pays. This page compares it against listmonk, against the rented incumbents, and against building the same thing yourself.
First: which reader are you?
Two types of people land on a page like this, and they have opposite problems.
Reader A: you need an email marketing tool. You send campaigns to your list. You have subscribers, you run promotions, you want some automation. You are not planning to sell this capability to anyone. For Reader A, the answer to "what should I use" is Brevo or Kit, and you can stop reading now.
Brevo bills per send: $29–$39 per month for 40,000 emails (sources conflict at this tier; as of 2026, emailtooltester.com/en/reviews/brevo/pricing/), with unlimited contacts from the 20,000-email tier upward. It ships with deliverability infrastructure, years of production use, and customer support. Kit gives 10,000 subscribers and unlimited sends at $0 (kit.com/pricing; reviewed 2026-01-19, emailtooltester.com). Neither of them charges you for the vendor position, because neither sells it.
Sendora is not cheaper than these options for Reader A. It costs more upfront, requires you to provision your own infrastructure, and demands significantly more configuration. If you want to send email for your business, this is not the right page.
Reader B: you want to run an email marketing platform, not send email from one. Your clients send campaigns through a platform that carries your name. You set the pricing. You decide what each plan allows. When a client asks why they cannot send more, the answer is a configuration you control, not a tier you escalate to a vendor. You are building the vendor business, not renting a seat in it.
Sendora is for Reader B. The rest of this page is for Reader B.
Sendora vs listmonk
listmonk is the first objection a technical buyer raises: "why would I pay for this when listmonk is free?"
What each is
listmonk is an open-source email and newsletter manager — campaign broadcasts, subscriber management, templates, analytics — distributed as a single Go binary against a Postgres database. It is unambiguously alive: v6.2.0 was released 2026-06-26, with nightly builds through 2026-07-20 and 22.6k GitHub stars (github.com/knadh/listmonk). Licensed AGPL-3.0. Free.
Sendora is a multi-tenant email marketing SaaS platform — the same campaign and subscriber surface as listmonk, plus organizations, per-tenant plan billing, DB-driven plan management, per-tenant sending domain verification, drip sequences, and a cross-organization admin control panel. It runs on Next.js and Supabase (Node + Postgres). It costs $249, once, under a commercial licence.
When listmonk is the right call
listmonk is the right choice when:
- You are sending your own campaigns or newsletters and have no clients to onboard
- You want the simplest possible self-hosted setup: a single Go binary, one Postgres database, no Node runtime, no Supabase project
- Zero licensing cost is a hard requirement
When Sendora is the right call
Sendora is the right choice when:
- You want to sell email marketing to clients as a service, with each client isolated in their own organization
- You need per-client billing: each tenant on a plan, each plan with its own contact and send limits, managed without a deploy
- You want the billing axis — per send, per contact, or flat monthly — to be a decision you make and revise in your admin panel
- The AGPL licence obligation is a concern for your intended use case
The money
listmonk: $0 licensing. You supply a server and a Postgres database. Sending costs pass through your own ESP account at whatever rate you negotiated.
Sendora: $249, once. You supply a Vercel deployment, a Supabase project, and an ESP account (Mailgun-led with a swappable provider interface). Your clients' sending costs you what you negotiate directly with your ESP.
What each does and does not do
| Sendora | listmonk | |
|---|---|---|
| Campaign broadcasts | Yes | Yes |
| Subscriber management | Yes | Yes |
| Double opt-in forms | Yes | Yes |
| Drip sequences / automation | Yes | No — campaigns only |
| Multi-tenant: sell to clients, each in their own org | Yes | No — single operator |
| Per-tenant sending domain with DNS verification | Yes | No |
| Per-tenant billing and DB-driven plan management | Yes | No |
| Organization-level deliverability monitoring | Yes | No |
| Configurable complaint and bounce thresholds | Yes | No |
| Stripe subscription billing per tenant | Yes | No |
| Licence | Commercial — own, modify, deploy, keep changes | AGPL-3.0 — modifications must be disclosed when running as a network service |
| Upfront cost | $249 | $0 |
| Stack | Next.js, Supabase, TypeScript | Go, Postgres |
| What listmonk does that Sendora does not | — | Single binary (one less runtime dependency); more production-proven at raw send scale; zero licensing cost; simpler for a single-operator setup |
The AGPL question
AGPL-3.0's network service clause requires source disclosure of your modifications when you run modified software as a service clients log in to — exactly the scenario a buyer building a client-facing platform is in. This is not a flaw in listmonk; it is an intentional design of the licence. Sendora's commercial licence removes the obligation: your modifications are yours to keep.
Four paths to running an email marketing business
If Reader B is your situation, there are four realistic paths to owning the vendor position. They have meaningfully different cost structures, ownership profiles, and time-to-first-client.
Path 1: Rent a SaaS and resell it (Mailchimp, Brevo, Kit)
Agency and partner arrangements exist, but they do not give you a multi-tenant product — you manage client accounts inside someone else's system while paying the platform at retail or negotiated rates. You do not control the billing model, the suppression rules, or the roadmap.
Mailchimp Standard runs approximately $135/month at 10,000 contacts (monthly billing, as of 2026-08-05, emailtooltester.com/en/reviews/mailchimp/pricing/). Brevo Standard runs approximately $75/month for 60,000 emails (as of 2026-03-10, emailtooltester.com/en/reviews/brevo/pricing/). These are the costs to you — the value your clients pay flows in part back to the platform.
Honest limit: this path is viable if the margin in reselling is sufficient and you do not need to modify how the product works. It is not viable if you need custom billing tiers, organisational isolation, or code you can carry to a different host.
Path 2: Hire a developer to build it
Custom development gives you complete ownership of the codebase and its architecture. A multi-tenant email platform — campaign engine, durable send queue, per-tenant isolation, billing — is a months-long engagement at US senior developer rates of $100–$200/hour (2026, estimate). The range for this scope: $20,000–$50,000+ in direct development cost (estimate).
Path 3: Buy a generic SaaS boilerplate
A generic Next.js + Supabase starter gives you authentication, billing primitives, and a multi-tenancy scaffold. It does not give you a campaign engine, a durable send queue, per-tenant sending domain management, suppression tables, deliverability monitoring, or click-primary analytics.
Path 4: Buy Sendora
The domain layer is done. Multi-tenant organization model, campaign and drip sequence engine, DB-driven plan management, per-tenant sending domain verification workflow, platform-wide deliverability guardrails, and click-primary analytics. You customize the product surface and pricing model for your market, deploy on your own infrastructure, and open for business.
The four paths compared
| Rent SaaS | Build custom | Generic boilerplate | Sendora | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Own the codebase | No | Yes | Partial | Yes |
| Multi-tenant with per-client billing | Agency workaround only | Build it | Build it | Included |
| Campaign engine and send queue | Vendor-managed | Build it | Build it | Included |
| Deliverability guardrails | Vendor-managed | Build it | Build it | Included |
| Billing axis you control | No | Yes | Build it | Yes |
| Time to first client | Hours (account setup) | Months | Weeks+ | Days |
| Upfront cost | $0 | $20k–$50k+ (estimate) | $100–$500 | $249 |
| Ongoing platform fee | Monthly SaaS fee | Infrastructure only | Infrastructure only | None |
Decision guide
Go to Brevo if the list you want to mail is your own. Brevo's per-send billing, unlimited contacts, and a sender reputation built over years make it the right choice for someone running their own campaigns — and nothing on this page competes with it for that reader.
Go to Kit if the audience is your own. Kit's free tier covers 10,000 subscribers with unlimited sends, and at that size it is a genuine product rather than a trap (kit.com/pricing). Sendora is not competing for that reader — it is what you deploy to serve a hundred of them.
Go to MailerLite Power or Kit Creator if you mail your own list at daily or near-daily frequency. Unlimited-send plans — Kit Creator at $139/month for 10,000 subscribers (as of 2026-01-19, emailtooltester.com) and MailerLite Power at $129/month at the same size (as of 2026-07-01, emailtooltester.com) — are the cheapest shape for high-frequency sending.
Go to listmonk if you want to self-host your own newsletter and zero licensing cost is the requirement. One binary against Postgres, no Node host, no Supabase project. AGPL-3.0 applies if you modify and host it; if you run it unmodified for your own use, the obligation does not trigger.
Go to Klaviyo if your clients are ecommerce businesses that need SMS campaigns, product feeds, and purchase-triggered revenue attribution alongside email. Klaviyo Email runs approximately $150/month at 10,000 profiles (as of 2025-12-17, emailtooltester.com/en/reviews/klaviyo/pricing/). Sendora is email-only and does not plan SMS or ecommerce product feeds.
Go to Mautic if the requirement is full marketing automation — lead scoring, multi-channel campaigns, CRM pipelines. Mautic (v7.1.3, active as of 2026-07-07, github.com/mautic/mautic) is the open-source answer. Sendora is a tight email-marketing core by deliberate design, not a marketing automation suite.
Buy Sendora if you want to run email marketing as a service for clients — under your own brand, with each client in their own isolated organization, on a billing structure you define and can edit without a deploy. The incumbent vendors made those decisions for themselves. Sendora ships the decision-making to you.
FAQ
Is per-send email pricing cheaper than per-contact pricing for email marketing?
Per-send billing is cheaper at low frequency: Brevo runs $29–$39/month for 40,000 emails (as of 2026, emailtooltester.com) against Mailchimp Standard at approximately $135/month for 10,000 contacts (as of 2026-08-05, emailtooltester.com). For a 10,000-subscriber list sent daily (300,000 sends/month), the arithmetic inverts: Kit Creator at $139/month or MailerLite Power at $129/month are roughly 3.6 times cheaper than Brevo's Professional tier, published as from $499/month (as of 2026, brevo.com/pricing).
Which email marketing platforms charge per send instead of per subscriber?
Brevo (formerly Sendinblue) is the major platform whose entire model is built on per-send billing: no contact slider, volume priced on emails per month, with unlimited contacts from the 20,000-email tier upward. Mailchimp also offers a pay-as-you-go per-send option alongside its standard per-contact plans (per emailtooltester, 2026-08-05). Neither model is binary: Kit Creator and MailerLite Power offer unlimited sends at the subscriber tier price.
Can I use listmonk to sell email marketing services to my own clients?
Not without building the multi-tenant SaaS layer yourself. listmonk is designed for a single operator sending their own lists — it has no concept of organizations, no per-tenant plan limits, no customer-facing signup flow, and no billing integration. A client accessing listmonk would see your data. Separating clients into isolated accounts requires building exactly the layer listmonk deliberately excludes: organization management, per-tenant quotas, billing and subscription handling.
What does AGPL-3.0 require if I modify listmonk and run it as a hosted service?
AGPL-3.0's network service clause requires that if you modify AGPL-licensed software and make it available to users over a network — including running it as a hosted service your clients log in to — you must make the source code of your modifications available under AGPL-3.0. This applies even when you do not distribute a binary. For a buyer who customizes listmonk to serve as a client-facing email platform, the disclosure obligation is active, not theoretical. Running unmodified listmonk for your own single-operator use does not trigger the obligation in the same way.
How much does Mailchimp cost for 10,000 contacts in 2026?
Mailchimp Standard runs approximately $135/month at 10,000 contacts on monthly billing (as of 2026-08-05, emailtooltester.com/en/reviews/mailchimp/pricing/; Mailchimp's own pricing page is JavaScript-rendered and was not machine-readable in this research pass). The Essentials plan at the same list size is approximately $110/month. Check mailchimp.com/pricing/marketing for current rates.
What is the cheapest way to email a 10,000-person list once a month?
Brevo — at $29–$39/month for 40,000 emails (sources conflict at this tier; as of 2026, emailtooltester.com). For a single monthly campaign to 10,000 people, costs would be lower still. This is not a use case Sendora is designed for.
What is the cheapest way to email a 10,000-person list every day?
Kit Creator at $139/month (10,000 subscribers, unlimited sends, as of 2026-01-19, emailtooltester.com) or MailerLite Power at $129/month for 10,000 subscribers with unlimited sends (as of 2026-07-01, emailtooltester.com). At daily sends, per-send billing reaches Brevo's Professional tier, published as from $499/month (as of 2026, brevo.com/pricing).
Is Brevo cheaper than Mailchimp for email marketing?
Yes, in most campaign-frequency scenarios. At 10,000 contacts with four monthly campaigns (40,000 sends), Brevo is $29–$39 against Mailchimp Standard at approximately $135 (both as of 2026, emailtooltester.com) — a 3.5x spread. For high-frequency senders, per-contact unlimited-sends plans such as Kit and MailerLite become cheaper, and Brevo's per-send model reaches Professional pricing. The direction depends on send frequency relative to list size.
What is the honest difference between Sendora and a self-hosted tool like listmonk or Keila?
All three run on your own infrastructure. Key differences: (1) Sendora is multi-tenant by design — organizations, per-tenant billing, per-tenant isolation; listmonk (v6.2.0, 2026-06-26, github.com/knadh/listmonk) and Keila (v0.30.2, 2026-06-26, github.com/pentacent/keila, AGPL-3.0) are single-tenant. (2) Sendora ships billing and plan management as built surfaces; listmonk and Keila do not. (3) Sendora carries a commercial licence; both are AGPL-3.0. (4) listmonk and Keila have simpler infrastructure — a single binary each — compared to Sendora's Next.js + Supabase stack.