Marc Lou says MailCheap is at three-figure MRR, delivery 99.2%
The vibe-coded beehiiv alternative is days old and the founder is already publishing its deliverability numbers.
Marc Lou says MailCheap, the newsletter tool he vibe-coded, is at three-figure MRR (monthly recurring revenue) and that delivery is currently running at 99.2%. In the same post he says he is opening up all metrics, including delivery rate, average open rate and bounce rate, and that there is not enough data yet to make those numbers reliable.
Delivery is currently 99.2%, but there isn’t enough data yet to make these numbers reliable.
That caveat is the interesting part. Deliverability is the one number an email product cannot fake for long, and most tools never show it. Lou is choosing to publish his while the sample is still tiny, which means the first bad week is public too.
The rest of the picture
He also said the business was profitable from day one, with no investors to please, so he will not raise prices every few months. The launch pitch was blunt about the target. He described MailCheap as a vibe-coded beehiiv that is 83% cheaper, with pricing from $19 a month, and ran the comparison himself. At 4,000 subscribers sending one email a week, he puts MailCheap at $19 against $109 on beehiiv Lite, a gap we covered earlier.
The product is open source and can be run for free on your own server. You pay for emails sent rather than for dormant subscribers, there is no "Powered By" badge on outgoing emails, and imports from beehiiv, Substack or Mailchimp are advertised at two minutes. Lou also says everything available in the UI is available to your AI, which is a different bet from the usual newsletter tool. Sending runs through an email service built by @jessethanley rather than AWS SES, and Lou says he is not affiliated with it.
For roadmap, he is asking paying users to drop requests into chat support, including crazy ones, and says he will build them.
The business read
Three figures of MRR is small money, and Lou says so by publishing it without dressing it up. The signal is not the revenue, it is the speed and the cost base. A solo founder shipped a credible competitor to a funded incumbent, priced it at a fifth, made it profitable immediately because there is nobody to pay back, and is now competing on transparency because that is a thing the incumbent structurally cannot copy. Whether 99.2% holds at volume is the open question, and nobody knows yet.
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