opensend.cc

opensend.cc is an open source email platform that runs on your own server. It is described as the self-hosted Resend alternative: a platform you deploy yourself, that sends email through your own AWS account, so your domain, your data and your sender reputation stay yours. The project is built by Kamal Panara and released under the Apache-2.0 license. Instead of renting an email API, you get the whole platform on your infrastructure: a REST API and SDK, SMTP, React templates, broadcasts, automations, audiences, webhooks and logs. One command installs it, and there is no per-email pricing and no feature gates. The product is aimed at developers and teams who want to send transactional and broadcast email without handing their sending infrastructure, contact data or reputation to a hosted vendor. The project grew out of a practical problem. Kamal Panara runs Panara Studios, an app agency that has shipped products for clients in more than 10 countries since 2021. Every app the agency built needed transactional email, and hosted email APIs charged per send while hiding the stack behind them. That combination — metered pricing plus an opaque, rented dependency at the centre of every application — is what opensend.cc was created to replace. The site sums the philosophy up directly: you send through your own AWS account, you pay Amazon to send, and you pay opensend.cc nothing. The result is that the infrastructure behind your email — the domain you send from, the database of contacts, the suppression list and the sending reputation — remains on hardware you control rather than inside a third-party service. On the sending side, opensend.cc exposes an API that is compatible with Resend. You can point a Resend-style SDK at your own opensend.cc URL and keep your application code, and the site notes that teams already on Resend only need to change two lines. A single POST request sends an email and returns a message identifier such as em_9f2, as shown in the landing page example that posts to /emails and receives a 201 response. The API supports scoped keys, batch send and idempotent retries, all with requests going to your own server rather than a hosted endpoint. Because the API surface mirrors the one developers already know, adopting it does not require rewriting an existing email integration; it requires changing where the requests are pointed. Delivery is handled through AWS SES by default, and plain SMTP is available for frameworks and plugins that already use it. opensend.cc can send through AWS SES or any SMTP relay, and the product shows you the DKIM, SPF and DMARC records you need to publish for your domain, with guided deliverability setup in the dashboard. Because sending runs through your own SES account, your SES reputation stays yours and is not shared with other customers — a meaningful difference from hosted providers where many senders share infrastructure. The site frames this as one of the core questions people ask before leaving Resend: whether their emails will actually reach the inbox. The answer offered is ownership of the sending reputation and guided DNS configuration for the domain you send from. Templates are written in React. You build emails as React components, preview them in the dashboard and send them by name, so email markup lives alongside the rest of an application's code. Contacts and audiences are first-class objects: you store contacts, group them into audiences and keep consent in your own Convex database rather than a vendor's. Broadcasts let you send product updates and newsletters to an audience, and they use the same SES pipeline as transactional mail, so there is one sending path for both kinds of email rather than two separate systems to configure and monitor. Together these features cover the common lifecycle of application email: a template defines the message, an audience defines the recipients, and a broadcast sends it. Webhooks deliver signed events for deliveries, bounces and complaints, and opensend.cc posts them to your endpoints with retries, so your application can react to what actually happened to a message. Logs and analytics make every message, event and error searchable from the dashboard, and bounces and complaints feed the suppression list automatically — the underlying data model includes domains, api_keys, emails and suppression. Test mode provides keys that accept everything and deliver nothing, which lets you wire up CI and staging environments without emailing real users. These capabilities are listed on the landing page alongside the surfaces they ship on, so you can see at a glance whether a feature is available on the API, on SMTP or in the dashboard. The overall approach is a self-hosted stack with nothing rented. opensend.cc is one Docker Compose file, running Next.js for the dashboard and API, self-hosted Convex as the database, Better Auth for accounts and AWS SES or any SMTP relay for delivery. The one-line installer pulls prebuilt images and starts Next.js, Convex and Better Auth with Docker Compose. From there the flow is four steps: run one command on your server, sign in on your instance with Better Auth, add your domain and connect AWS SES, then create an API key and send your first email. A shorter three-step framing describes the same journey as deploy, connect SES and send. Detailed documentation covers Docker Compose, AWS SES, Convex and Better Auth step by step. The outcome for a user is straightforward ownership. Your domains, data and accounts stay on your infrastructure, which the site describes as running your email API on your own server and paying Amazon rather than the vendor. Costs become the VPS and AWS SES usage, plus optional sponsorship tiers, instead of per-email pricing. Because there are no feature gates, every capability — templates, audiences, broadcasts, webhooks, logs — is available in the free self-hosted build. Sender reputation is not shared with other customers, and contacts and consent records remain in your own Convex database. For teams that have been billed per send by a hosted API, the result is predictable infrastructure cost and a stack they can inspect, modify and self-manage. Several concrete scenarios follow from the feature set. Transactional email is the primary one: any application that needs to send password resets, receipts or notifications can POST to the API with curl, a Resend SDK or plain SMTP and see the message in the logs. Newsletters and product updates are handled through broadcasts, which send to an audience over the same SES pipeline used for transactional mail. CI and staging workflows use test-mode keys that accept everything and deliver nothing, so automated pipelines never email real users. Teams migrating from Resend change the base URL on their SDK and keep their existing code. Finally, new installs use the guided DKIM, SPF and DMARC records to set up deliverability for their sending domain. opensend.cc is built for developers and technical teams who own their application infrastructure and want their email layer to match. The stack it runs on is explicit — Next.js, Convex, Better Auth, AWS SES and Docker Compose — and the documentation is written for people comfortable running a server and deploying containers. Pricing has two tracks. Self-host is open source and free forever under Apache-2.0: you get the full source code, the Next.js dashboard and API, self-hosted Convex and Better Auth, AWS SES or any SMTP relay, the Resend-compatible REST API and SMTP, templates, audiences, broadcasts, webhooks and logs, plus community support on GitHub — and you cover your own server and AWS SES costs. Cloud is a managed option, described as the same API with the servers run for you, currently marked coming soon with a waitlist. Sponsorship tiers, including Gold at $249/mo, are also offered; sponsors decide what ships next, get their issues fixed first and keep the project free. The primary value proposition is simple: send like Resend, own the stack. opensend.cc gives you a Resend-compatible REST API and SMTP, React templates, audiences, broadcasts, webhooks and searchable logs, deployed with one Docker Compose command onto infrastructure you control, with AWS SES or any SMTP relay doing the delivery. You pay Amazon to send and opensend.cc nothing, while your domains, contacts and sender reputation stay yours.