Built a self-hosted Klaviyo alternative after the 25% price hike
Hey everyone,
I've been lurking in this group for a while and finally have something worth sharing.
The backstory: I was running email marketing for a D2C store, paying ~$400/month for Klaviyo at 25k contacts. Then last February they announced the 25% price increase. Having worked on similar systems to Klaviyo in the past like Stay AI, I built Kling, a self-hosted marketing automation platform for ecommerce called Kling.to
What it does:
- Email flows (abandoned cart, welcome series, win-back, etc.)
- Customer segmentation by purchase history & behavior
- Shopify, WooCommerce, BigCommerce integrations
- Visual email editor
- Real-time analytics
Why self-host?
- Cost: ~$0/mo instead of $400+. Just pay peanuts for SMTP (AWS SES is $0.10/1k emails).
- Data ownership: Your customer data stays on your server. No vendor lock-in.
- No surprises: No more "we're raising prices 25%" emails.
The trade-off: You need to be comfortable with Docker or have someone who is. Setup takes about 10 minutes if you know what you're doing.
Who it's for:
Kling.to is for bootstrappers and small teams running ecommerce stores who are tired of paying enterprise prices for email marketing. If you're sending 50k+ emails/month, self-hosting pays for itself immediately.
Happy to answer questions or give feedback on anyone's email marketing setup. Thank you!
This resonates. The self-hosting angle makes total sense when you're paying $400/month for software where the core value is just email delivery.
I'm doing something similar but for newsletter creators frustrated with Beehiiv and Substack. Instead of self-hosted I went managed — creators bring their own SMTP provider and pay a flat monthly fee. The cost savings math is almost identical to yours.
The hardest part I'm finding is that most creators don't realize how much margin they're giving up to their platform. What was your biggest challenge convincing ecommerce store owners to make the switch?
Self-hosting after a price hike is the right move when the vendor’s value prop is the software, not the network. Klaviyo’s moat is deliverability and integrations — both reproducible. The 25% hike just made the math obvious.
I did something similar building flompt — rather than paying per-seat for prompt management tools, I built a self-contained visual prompt builder (open source, MIT). The recurring cost model for dev tooling is increasingly hard to justify when the alternative is a one-time build.
A ⭐ on github.com/Nyrok/flompt would mean a lot — solo open-source founder here 🙏