A lone monitor glow in a dark room, stacks of mail and a cup of coffee
All spreads ·Spread 02 / 04·Open Source · Marketing Email

owlat.app

Open-source email marketing, finally.

StatusBetaYear2026Domainowlat.app
Spread 02 · The story

An email marketing platform you can host, fork, theme and trust. Campaigns, automations, transactional and contacts — without the SaaS lock-in.

Owlat is a full email marketing stack — campaign builder, automation flows, transactional API, contact management — released under a permissive license. The bet: marketing email deserves the same care, openness and craft we give to code editors and design tools.

It works as a SaaS for teams who just want to send their newsletter, and as a self-hostable monorepo for teams who want to own every byte. The interface borrows from terminal-fluent tools: keyboard-first, dense when you want it, calm when you don't.

"

Marketing email got captured by ten companies and a billion dark patterns. We rebuilt it as a tool — open, hostable, and yours.

— Workbench notes

Section II

The small
stuff.

The decisions you don't see in screenshots — but feel in the using.

  1. 01

    Campaigns + automations

    A block-based email builder with multi-step automation flows. Trigger on signup, on tag, on a date — branch on opens, clicks or custom events. The drag-and-drop affordances stay out of the way of the keyboard.

  2. 02

    Transactional API

    A drop-in transactional endpoint with copy-paste code snippets in JavaScript and Java right inside the dashboard. Receipts, password resets and welcome mails without standing up a separate service.

  3. 03

    Contacts you actually own

    Self-hostable contact lists with org-level permissions via BetterAuth. Import, segment, tag and export — your audience is a CSV away from leaving with you.

  4. 04

    Keyboard-first navigation

    g + c for contacts, g + m for campaigns, g + t for transactional. n for new, s for save, ? for the full map. The mouse is welcome, but never required.

Materials

Built with

Boring tech, used carefully. The sharp edges go in the design, not the stack.

  • Nuxt 4
  • Vue 3
  • Tailwind 4
  • Bun
  • Convex
  • BetterAuth
  • Postgres
  • Redis

Cover · Photo on Unsplash