Why marketing email needed an open-source tool.
On rebuilding the most captured corner of SaaS — and why we gave the source away.
Marketing email is one of those product categories that quietly got captured. There are maybe ten companies you'd consider, all of them charge per-seat or per-contact, and every one of them treats your subscriber list like collateral. Try exporting it sometime.
We started Owlat because we needed it for our own newsletters and the math stopped making sense. Why are we paying $400/month to send 18 emails? Why does the export require a sales call? Why is the DSL for an automation flow a proprietary visual builder owned by a company that just got acquired?
Building it is one thing. Open-sourcing it is the bet. The bet is: the next decade of SaaS is people getting tired of renting. We've seen it with auth (BetterAuth, Clerk), with databases (Supabase, Convex), with editors (VS Code, Zed). Marketing email is overdue.
What we shipped: a campaign builder, a multi-step automation engine, a transactional API, contact management, all under MIT. You can self-host it. You can fork it. You can rip out the parts you don't need. We host a managed version for teams who don't want to operate Postgres at 3am, but the managed version is opt-in — not the funnel.
The next decade of SaaS is people getting tired of renting.
— Field Notes № 02