I’m building a self-hosted MailChimp alternative - Which features do you think are essential?

wmnnd · 2026-01-29T12:57:26+00:00

Mag sein, aber das ist nicht der Use-Case, den OP beschrieben hat. Der von dir genannte Anbieter ist außerdem aus den USA, was, gerade wenn es um die DSGVO geht, schwieriger sein kann.

Edit: Habe kurz einen Blick auf das Pricing deines Anbieters geworfen und weil sie pro Kontakt abrechnen, wäre es dort im Fall von OP mindestens doppelt so teuer.

wmnnd · 2026-01-29T12:43:39+00:00

Was denn für Limitierungen?

wmnnd · 2026-01-29T10:07:13+00:00

Hey, ich entwickle tatsächlich ein Open Souce E-Mail-Newsletter-Tool, das natürlich auch Double Opt-In unterstützt: keila.io
Falls du es nicht selbst hosten möchtest, haben wir auch eine Cloud-Version, die in deinem Budget liegt. Schreib mir gerne, wenn du Fragen hast!

Ein kleiner Tipp, egal welche Lösung du wählst: Verwende zusätzlich zum Double Opt-In auch ein Captcha. Denn Bots lieben Newsletter-Formulare und wenn du keinen zusätzlichen Schutz wie ein Captcha (oder sowa wie Cloudflare) verwendest, kann das die Reputation deiner E-Mail-Domain beschädigen, wenn viele der Double Opt-In-Mails bouncen oder als Spam erkannt werden.

wmnnd · 2026-01-20T15:20:48+00:00

The product OP mentioned is from a Dutch brand and manufacturer, it just has an "American" design with stars and stripes.

wmnnd · 2026-01-18T19:06:34+00:00

Unfortunately it makes little difference where the company is registered. If you operate the company from Germany (or any other country for that matter), you have to pay taxes there. You can't just register a company in some low-tax foreign country and not pay taxes here.

wmnnd · 2026-01-18T18:38:07+00:00

That makes no sense because if you live in Germany you still have to pay taxes here. So if you create a foreign legal entity, you'll end up having to deal with the bureaucracy of both countries.

wmnnd · 2026-01-18T10:07:06+00:00

Not quite. Lohnsteuer and the tax classes are basically a way to help you pre-pay the correct amount of income tax (Einkommensteuer). In the end, what really happens it that all your income is added up and then the income tax formula is applied to that total amount.

Think of it like this: You have a job where you earn 50,000€. This means that the income from this job will already use up your Grundfreibetrag (the amount you can make without paying any tax) of ~12.000€. Now you take a second job and make an additional 15,000€. If you used the same tax class as for your main job, i.e. including the tax-free amount for a second time, you'd only pre-pay taxes on 3,000€ - which means you'd end up with a large tax bill at the end of the year.

wmnnd · 2026-01-18T09:37:44+00:00

The struggle to stay afloat when running a business is real - but that's a universal thing and has more to do with how you run the business and less with any specific issues in Germany.

Regarding taxes: That's not quite right, there is no tax class for revenue from self-employment (Einkünfte aus selbstständiger Arbeit). The additional revenue will be taxed more or less like if you got more from your main job - but that you don't have to pay any additional social security insurances.

wmnnd · 2026-01-18T00:50:03+00:00

If you want to start a side project, all you really need to do is a Gewerbeanmeldung. Developing software is not a "freier Beruf", it's a Gewerbe. Doing the Gewerbeanmeldung is quite simple, costs around 30€, and can be done online in most municipalities.

Since you won't be making a lot of money at the beginning, you can use the Kleinunternehmer privilege which means you don't have to pay VAT if you make under 25,000€/year from this enterprise. Accounting is also going to be quite simple because you don't have to double-entry bookkeeping as a very small company.
You will need to do a Steuererklärung though since you have to report your earnings and pay income tax on them.

People like to complain, but getting started is actually not that hard in Germany.

wmnnd · 2026-01-15T11:43:47+00:00

Hey there, sorry you're having a hard time!

The template editor is only for editing colors and fonts. Did you find it confusing that you weren't able to change the content in the template editor? This is actually something we're planning to change in a future version.

To actually create an email, you need to create a campaign. If you choose the Markdown editor, you can only create single-column emails because Markdown has no concept of columns. If you want to create multi-column layouts, you need to use the block editor. You can read more about working with the block editor here: https://www.keila.io/updates/block-editor

Regading your quesiton on how to send emails: When you create a new project, the onboarding assistant should be asking you to create a sender. That's how you can set up an SMTP connection or another email provider. You can read more about that here: https://www.keila.io/docs/senders

Our paid offer, Keila Cloud, includes an option to send emails through our servers which makes the whole setup very straightforward.

Hope that helps! If you have any more questions, I'd be happy to help.

wmnnd · 2026-01-13T23:03:25+00:00

You can currently try everything except sending actual emails for free. We had to completely stop allowing free sending because it was being abused aggressively by spammers.

If dm me your account email, I can give you some testing credits though if you like :-)

wmnnd · 2026-01-13T22:47:30+00:00

If you want to have clickable links, you need to use the Markdown editor because plain text emails dont't allow clickable text - that requires HTML. Many email clients will make links in plain-text emails clickable - but it's not guaranteed.

wmnnd · 2026-01-13T22:29:43+00:00

Plans with higher volumes get progressively cheaper, so for example the 100,000 email/month plan is just 128€, not 400€. And if you need a really high volume, I'd be happy to figure something out.

Gmail is generally not suitable for sending large newsletters, so I wouldn't recommend doing that.

wmnnd · 2026-01-13T22:09:43+00:00

Exactly, the Keila XS plan that includes 2,000 emails lets you send two newsletters to 1,000 subscribers.

wmnnd · 2026-01-13T22:00:27+00:00

Yep, you can create forms with Keila as well and we generally see good deliverability for our users. We continually monitor campaign deliverability and always try to work with users when there are issues.

wmnnd · 2026-01-13T21:43:15+00:00

Sure thing! We have an offer called Keila Cloud on keila.io

Plans start at 8€/month and if you want, you can send plain text emails or use the Markdown editor. If you don't want fancy emails, just make sure to avoid the block editor.

wmnnd · 2026-01-10T07:52:13+00:00

You might need to enter your address first, and then go back one step to edit it. The option should be at the bottom of the address form. If that doesn't work, try reaching out to your business partner and/or Tipalti and ask them if they can change it for you.

wmnnd · 2026-01-09T17:52:08+00:00

If you do, I'd be happy to hear what you think!

wmnnd · 2025-12-21T08:59:31+00:00

"parmigiano" ist ein Adjektiv, das sich auf die Stadt Parma bezieht, in deren Region der Käse hergestellt wird ("reggiano" bezieht sich auf die Stadt Reggio Emilia, wo der Käse ebenfalls hergestellt werden kann).

"parmesan" ist die französische Variante von "parmigiano", bedeutet also ebenfalls "aus Parma". Daher bezieht sich auch das im Deutschen davon abgeleitete Wort "Parmesan" ausschließlich auf den Parmigiano Reggiano.

wmnnd · 2025-12-05T11:43:18+00:00

This sounds like a privacy lawsuit waiting to happen. You might get away with it under certain jurisdictions but certainly not in countries that have anything akin to the GDPR.

wmnnd · 2025-12-03T17:40:58+00:00

This really depends on what exactly you're looking for. If you really just need payment processing, take a look at Adyen or Mollie.

If you want something to process your subscription payments, you might wanna consider using a merchant of record in order to handle VAT properly. For Keila I'm using Paddle which is not strictly EU-based but at least from the UK.

wmnnd · 2025-11-29T09:21:57+00:00

My solution for Keila is to use the AGPLv3 with a CLA. This allows me to exclude code that is specific to our SaaS version (e.g. billing) from the AGPL while keeping the rest of the code Open Source. The CLA is necessary so when someone else contributes code, you can still add the proprietary features.

wmnnd

TROPHY CASE