MailCheap on Unbroker

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A newsletter app where you pay your email provider for the emails you send, not a platform for every subscriber on your list. Write an issue, send it to your list and publish it on the web, from the dashboard or from an AI agent through its MCP server and REST API. Imports beehiiv, Substack, Mailchimp, Kit and other CSV exports as they are.

What gets deployed

Service	Image	Notes
MailCheap	ghcr.io/unbroker-app/mailcheap-container	Public. The upstream app, built from a pinned commit by mailcheap-container
db	MongoDB 7	Internal. Accounts, contacts, campaigns and stats

The session secret and the key of the never-email list are generated for you. Don’t change them later: the first signs everyone out and breaks the links in emails already sent, the second empties the list.

Before you deploy

MailCheap signs you in with a code it emails, so it needs a way to send email from the first minute. Pick one:

• Resend (quickest): verify the domain of EMAIL_FROM at Resend and fill in RESEND_API_KEY.
• Amazon SES: fill in the SES_* fields and verify the domain of EMAIL_FROM in that AWS account (Identities, Easy DKIM).

Without either, the app runs but nobody can sign in.

After deploy

1. Open the app’s URL and sign in with ADMIN_EMAIL. Only that address and the ones in ALLOWED_EMAILS can sign in.
2. To send to readers, follow upstream’s self-hosting guide, steps 4 to 6, with your app’s URL in place of the Vercel one:
   • Amazon SES: production access, an SNS topic subscribed to https://<your-app>/api/webhooks/ses, and an IAM user with the policy the guide lists. Fill in the SES_* variables.
   • Upstash QStash: fill in QSTASH_TOKEN and the two signing keys. QStash calls your app back over the internet to send each batch.
   • Add your sending domain under Domains, create a newsletter, then set SENDING_ENABLED to true.

Until SENDING_ENABLED is true, nothing reaches readers. Sign-in codes and alerts go out either way.

Caveats

• Amazon SES only. The template sets EMAIL_PROVIDER=ses. For PostShiba (invite only), change it to postshiba and add the POSTSHIBA_* variables from upstream’s .env.example.
• Image uploads are off until you add an S3 bucket behind CloudFront (IMAGES_S3_*, IMAGES_CDN_URL) or a Vercel Blob token. Campaigns can still use images hosted anywhere.
• Rate limits are per container. Upstash Redis (UPSTASH_REDIS_REST_*) shares them, but it only matters with more than one instance.
• Built-in pages show a placeholder URL. The docs pages, robots.txt, sitemap.xml and llms.txt are rendered when the image is built, before your URL exists, so they show http://localhost:3000. Email links, sign-in, the API and MCP use your real URL.
• Google sign-in, Telegram alerts and the other optional settings in upstream’s .env.example can be added as variables on the service.

Service configuration

• db: mongodb. Private service. 1 GiB persistent storage.
• MailCheap: ghcr.io/unbroker-app/mailcheap-container:sha-6225f69e3c98b42745fab34d827f7b5ed4d3c63c. Public URL.

Project links

• Website
• Source code
• Documentation

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