Here’s a number that might sting a little. If you have 10,000 email contacts on Klaviyo, you’re paying around $150 per month. On Mailchimp, it’s roughly $100. That’s $1,200 to $1,800 per year just to send emails to people who already want to hear from you.
Now imagine paying $15 to $25 per month for the same thing. No contact limits. No surprise price hikes. Full ownership of your data. That’s what a self-hosted email marketing stack looks like, and it’s more accessible than you might think.
In this guide, I’ll walk you through the three components you need, what they cost, and how they fit together with WooCommerce.
Why Go Self-Hosted in the First Place?
Let’s be honest. SaaS email platforms are convenient. You sign up, connect your store, and start sending. But that convenience comes with trade-offs that get harder to ignore as your store grows.
Cost savings at scale. Most SaaS email tools price by contact count. The more your list grows, the more you pay. With a self-hosted setup, your costs stay nearly flat whether you have 5,000 contacts or 500,000.
Data ownership and privacy. When you use a third-party platform, your customer data lives on their servers. They can change their terms, get acquired, or suffer a breach. With self-hosting, your data stays on your infrastructure. For GDPR-conscious businesses, this is a major win since your customer information never leaves servers you control.
No vendor lock-in. Ever tried migrating away from a platform that holds all your automations, templates, and contact history? It’s painful. A self-hosted stack gives you portability and independence.
Full customization. You’re not limited to whatever features your SaaS provider decides to build. You control every piece of the stack and can extend it however you need.
The Three Components You Need
A self-hosted email marketing stack for WooCommerce has three parts. Each one handles a specific job, and together they replace what platforms like Klaviyo or ActiveCampaign do in one bundle.
1. Marketing Automation Platform: Mautic
Mautic is the engine of this whole setup. It’s an open-source marketing automation platform that you host yourself, and it’s surprisingly powerful for something that costs nothing to license.
Here’s what you get out of the box:
- A visual campaign builder with drag-and-drop workflow design
- Contact segmentation based on behavior, tags, and custom fields
- Lead scoring so you can identify your most engaged customers
- A built-in email template editor
- Landing page creation
- Detailed analytics and reporting
If you’ve used any mainstream marketing platform, Mautic will feel familiar. The interface is clean, the campaign builder is intuitive, and the segmentation tools are genuinely flexible. It’s not a stripped-down “free version” of something better. It’s a full-featured platform backed by an active open-source community.
2. Email Delivery Service: Don’t Skip This
This is where a lot of people stumble. Mautic handles the automation and logic, but you still need a reliable way to actually deliver emails to inboxes. Sending directly from your own server IP is technically possible, but unless you really know what you’re doing with SPF, DKIM, IP reputation, and deliverability monitoring, your emails will end up in spam folders fast.
Instead, plug Mautic into a dedicated email delivery service. The best options for self-hosted setups are:
- Amazon SES – Around $0.10 per 1,000 emails. Extremely cheap at scale and rock-solid reliability. The go-to choice for most self-hosters.
- Mailgun – Slightly more expensive but offers better analytics and a generous free tier for testing.
- Postmark – Known for excellent deliverability, especially for transactional emails.
- SparkPost – Good option if you need advanced deliverability tools and detailed reporting.
Amazon SES is the most popular choice by far. At a tenth of a cent per email, you could send 100,000 emails for $10. That kind of pricing is what makes the self-hosted approach so compelling.
3. WooCommerce Connector: Bridging the Gap
Mautic handles your marketing. SES handles delivery. But how does your WooCommerce store data get into Mautic in the first place? That’s where the Mautic Integration for WooCommerce plugin comes in.
This plugin connects your store directly to your Mautic instance and automatically syncs the data you need for effective email marketing:
- Customer contacts synced as Mautic leads with full details
- Order data including products purchased, order value, and coupons used
- Abandoned cart tracking so you can recover lost revenue
- Lifetime value (LTV) calculations per customer
- Category-based tags for targeted segmentation
Without a connector like this, you’d be stuck manually exporting CSVs or building custom API integrations. The plugin handles all of that automatically in the background.
Hosting Mautic: Your Options
Mautic needs a server to run on. You have a couple of paths here depending on how hands-on you want to be.
Self-managed VPS. Providers like DigitalOcean, Vultr, and Hetzner offer virtual private servers starting at $5 to $20 per month. For Mautic, you’ll want at least 2GB of RAM, PHP 7.4 or higher, and a MySQL database. A $10 to $15 droplet on DigitalOcean handles most small-to-medium stores without breaking a sweat. Hetzner is a great budget pick if you’re in or near Europe.
Managed Mautic hosting. If you’d rather not manage the server yourself, Mautic.com offers a cloud-hosted version, and Acquia (which acquired Mautic) provides enterprise-grade managed hosting. These cost more but remove the server management piece entirely.
For most WooCommerce store owners, a $10 to $15 VPS is the sweet spot. It keeps costs low while giving you full control.
The Real Cost Comparison
Let’s put actual numbers side by side. Assume you have 10,000 contacts and send around 40,000 emails per month.
SaaS route:
- Klaviyo: ~$150/month
- Mailchimp: ~$100/month
- ActiveCampaign: ~$120/month
Self-hosted route:
- VPS for Mautic: $10-15/month
- Amazon SES (40,000 emails): ~$4/month
- WooCommerce connector plugin: one-time or low annual cost
- Total: ~$15-25/month
That’s a savings of $75 to $125 every single month. Over a year, you’re keeping $900 to $1,500 in your pocket. And here’s the kicker: when your list grows to 50,000 contacts, your SaaS costs might triple, but your self-hosted costs barely budge. The VPS might need a small upgrade, and your SES bill goes up a few dollars. That’s it.
Setting It Up: The High-Level Steps
I won’t turn this into a full technical tutorial (we have a dedicated setup guide for that). But here’s what the process looks like at a high level so you know what you’re getting into.
Step 1: Spin up a VPS and install Mautic. Pick a provider, create a server with Ubuntu or Debian, install the LAMP/LEMP stack (Apache or Nginx, PHP, MySQL), and then install Mautic. There are plenty of one-click install scripts and community guides that make this straightforward. Budget about an hour for this if it’s your first time.
Step 2: Configure your email delivery service. Sign up for Amazon SES (or your preferred provider), verify your sending domain, and set up the SMTP credentials. Then plug those credentials into Mautic’s email settings. This usually takes 15 to 30 minutes, plus a day or two for SES to approve your account for production sending.
Step 3: Install the Mautic Integration for WooCommerce plugin. Upload it to your WordPress site, activate it, and connect it to your Mautic instance using OAuth2 credentials. The plugin walks you through the connection process.
Step 4: Connect and start syncing. Configure which data you want to sync, set up your field mappings, and let the plugin do its thing. Your existing customers will start flowing into Mautic, and new orders will sync automatically going forward.
From there, you build your email campaigns, automations, and segments inside Mautic just like you would in any other platform.
Who Is This For?
A self-hosted email marketing stack isn’t for everyone, and that’s fine. Here’s a quick reality check.
This is a great fit if you:
- Are comfortable with basic server management (or willing to learn)
- Have 5,000+ contacts where SaaS pricing starts to hurt
- Run a privacy-focused business and want full control of customer data
- Need GDPR compliance without trusting a third party with your data
- Want to eliminate vendor lock-in and own your marketing infrastructure
You should probably stick with SaaS if you:
- Are a complete beginner who has never touched a server and doesn’t want to start
- Have a very small list (under 1,000 contacts) where free SaaS tiers cover your needs
- Need plug-and-play simplicity with zero setup time
There’s no shame in using a SaaS tool when it makes sense. But if you’ve been watching your email marketing bill climb month after month as your list grows, self-hosting is worth serious consideration.
Take Control of Your Email Marketing
Building a self-hosted email marketing stack sounds like a big project, but the individual pieces are simpler than you’d expect. Mautic gives you the automation platform. Amazon SES gives you cheap, reliable delivery. And the Mautic Integration for WooCommerce plugin ties it all together by keeping your store data in sync automatically.
The result is a marketing setup that costs a fraction of what SaaS platforms charge, scales without penalty, and keeps your customer data exactly where it belongs: on your servers, under your control.
If you’re ready to make the switch, start by checking out our step-by-step guide to connecting Mautic with WooCommerce. It covers the full setup process from start to finish.
