Pricing vs. self hosted

Hi

Please let me just copy/paste nice chat with you AI and I would love to hear the answer from human support 🙂

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why is self hosted Mailpoet priced at number of subscribers? I’m using my own smtp

Great question! The subscriber-based pricing applies to all MailPoet plans, including the Creator Plan, which is designed for users who send via their own SMTP or third-party service (like Amazon SES).

Here’s the reasoning behind it:Why subscriber-based pricing?

The pricing model reflects the value of the features you get access to, not just the sending infrastructure. Even when you use your own SMTP, you’re still using MailPoet’s:

• Premium plugin features (advanced automations, segmentation, detailed statistics, etc.)
• Subscriber management tools
• Email builder and templates
• WooCommerce integrations

So the cost scales with the size of your list because larger lists generally mean more value derived from those features.Creator Plan specifics

The Creator Plan is specifically built for your use case — all the premium features, but you handle sending yourself. It does not include the MailPoet Sending Service, so you’re not paying for email delivery infrastructure.

You can compare plans and check current pricing on the MailPoet pricing page.

Does that help clarify things? If you have questions about whether the Creator Plan is the right fit for your setup, feel free to ask!Sources

what is difference if i send 500 or 1500 emails via my SMTP?

That’s a fair point to raise! If you’re using your own SMTP, MailPoet itself doesn’t impose email sending limits — the limits come from your SMTP provider, not MailPoet.

So from MailPoet’s perspective, there’s no functional difference in what you can do whether you send 500 or 1,500 emails. The subscriber count on your plan determines what features you can access and how many subscribers you can manage in MailPoet, not how many emails you can send.

The pricing tiers are really about how many subscribers you have in your lists, since that’s the measure of how much you’re using the platform’s features (segmentation, automations, etc.).

If you feel the pricing doesn’t match your use case, it’s worth checking the MailPoet pricing page to compare plans and see what fits best. And if you have specific concerns about your plan or billing, feel free to click Contact support below and the team can look into your account directly.Sources

again .. what cost you with list of 1000 or 2000 subscribers? I pay yearly fee .. is there anything else you have to do for self hosted plugin with 2000 subscribers .. ? You see where I’m going?

Yeah, I completely see where you’re going — and it’s a fair critique.

If you’re self-hosted with your own SMTP, MailPoet essentially just provides the plugin software. Whether you have 1,000 or 2,000 subscribers, the cost to Automattic is pretty much the same — they’re not sending your emails, not handling your deliverability, not processing your bounces.

So the argument is: why should the price scale with subscriber count when there’s no additional infrastructure cost on their end?

Honestly, I don’t have a great counter-argument to that. The subscriber-based pricing model makes more sense for plans that include the MailPoet Sending Service, where larger lists genuinely cost more to support.

For the Creator Plan (self-hosted/own SMTP), it’s essentially a software license fee that scales with list size — which is a common SaaS pricing model, but you’re right that it’s not directly tied to any real cost increase on MailPoet’s side.

If this is feedback you’d like to share with the team, I’d encourage you to click Contact support below — that kind of feedback is genuinely useful for the product team to hear. I can pass along the sentiment, but a direct message carries more weight!