Marc Lou launches MailCheap at $19 against beehiiv's $109
The side project he built to leave beehiiv now has a price list and an open source repo.
Marc Lou has put MailCheap on sale from $19 a month, the commercial version of the newsletter platform he built for himself after leaving beehiiv. His pitch is a single line of arithmetic. Four thousand subscribers at one email a week costs $19 on MailCheap against $109 on beehiiv Lite, because you pay for emails sent rather than for dormant subscribers.
The rest of the launch post reads like a checklist aimed squarely at the incumbent. Editor, scheduling, stats, a website for every issue, deliverability guardrails, sending from your own domain. It is open source, so you can run it on your own server for free, and Marc says imports from beehiiv, Substack or Mailchimp take two minutes. No "Powered By" badge at the bottom of the emails.
I vibe-coded beehiiv, and it's 83% cheaper.
The backlog that landed first
Two days earlier, beehiiv founder Tyler Denk had posted the counterargument without naming anyone. He said every week someone tells him they are going to vibe-code their own beehiiv alternative over the weekend, then published the backlog they would need to cover. Suppression lists at three layers, global, per publication and transactional. Classifying every bounce as hard, soft, mailbox full or DNS failure. Warming new IPs and domains on a schedule. Watching blocklists around the clock and pulling an IP from rotation the moment it is listed. Retrying deferred mail for 24 hours before calling it a bounce. He claims a 99.3% delivery rate and infrastructure that sends 3M emails a minute.
Denk's second list is the one founders will recognise faster. The stack a clone still pays for anyway, sending through SendGrid or Amazon SES, hosting, database and queue, payments, auth, monitoring, bot protection, email validation, media storage, product analytics. His closing line is that at least you saved $59 a month.
Arvid Kahl replied to the backlog with one sentence, which is the whole argument from the other side compressed into a joke.
The business read is that both men are right about different timescales. Marc has a working product, an open source repo and a price that is hard to argue with on day one. Denk's list is mostly things that fail quietly, months later, as inbox placement slips. Nobody can tell yet which way MailCheap's churn goes.
Hey Claude, implement every item on this list. Make no mistakes.
Steal the numbers, not the vibes
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