Your own email marketing system instead of HubSpot and Mailchimp: no per-contact fees
We build segmentation, campaigns, personalisation and reporting in your own system. Emails go out through a specialist provider (Amazon SES, Postmark, SendGrid or Resend), so deliverability doesn’t suffer, and you stop paying for stored contacts.
- $23k–$40k → $3k–$6k a year at 50,000 contacts
- Sending ≈$0.10 per 1,000 emails
- Your contact base stays yours
HubSpot
Klaviyo
Mailchimp
ActiveCampaign
Constant Contact
Semrush
Ahrefs
HubSpot Marketing Pro versus your own campaign system on transactional email infrastructure. 200,000 emails a month cost about $20 in send fees; the rest is model inference for segmentation and copy, plus hosting.
Why you are overpaying
Email, lifecycle marketing and outbound sequences.
In small and mid-market software, no category has a wider gap between what is billed and what is delivered. These platforms charge for stored contacts, although one more stored contact costs them almost nothing, and the charge grows as your business succeeds at the very thing the software is supposed to help with.
The same job at 4–6× the price
At 50,000 profiles Customer.io costs ≈$505 a month and HubSpot Marketing Pro costs $1,900–$3,300, for roughly the same job. Customer.io is itself a commercial SaaS product with a healthy margin. A spread that wide between two vendors, before any argument about AI, is the clearest sign that pricing in this category has come loose from cost.
Next to it in the budget
Semrush at $117–$456 / mo with seats at +$45 each, Ahrefs at $129–$449 / mo with per-seat add-ons and credits, and Copy.ai, whose tiers jump from $29 to $1,000 a month with nothing in between. Content-generation tools in particular are thin wrappers over the same models you could call directly.
- Segmentation, campaign orchestration, personalisation and reporting
- Copy and segment generation with models called directly, without a per-contact fee
- Delivery itself: sending goes through Amazon SES, Postmark, SendGrid or Resend at about $0.10 per thousand emails
Why we don’t rebuild deliverability
An in-house attempt at email deliverability would destroy your sender reputation. IP warming, DKIM/SPF/DMARC alignment, feedback loops, bounce and complaint handling, and the relationships behind inbox placement at Gmail and Outlook are a job for specialist providers. Your own system replaces segmentation, orchestration, personalisation and reporting, and sends through one of those providers.
Build economics
Indicative ranges for a production system rather than a prototype: authentication, audit log, error handling, monitoring and a usable admin are included. Build assumes AI-assisted delivery by a senior team. Run cost covers inference, hosting, monitoring and maintenance, but not new features.
How the project goes
- 01
SaaS audit
Identify which tools have the highest cost-to-utility ratio.
- 02
The 80/20 parity
Instead of aiming for 100% feature parity, build the 20% of features your team uses 80% of the time.
- 03
Context-first architecture
Design the system around your data (vector databases + RAG) so the AI understands your jargon, clients, and history from day one, and organize it around workflows rather than apps.
- 04
An AI-native operating model
Plan governance, risk controls, human oversight, data readiness, and team structure as part of the strategy instead of leaving them for cleanup after launch.
- 05
Phased decommissioning
Run the custom tool in parallel with the SaaS for 30 days before cutting the subscription.
Cases
Questions about this replacement
Yes. We don’t rebuild deliverability: sending goes through Amazon SES, Postmark, SendGrid or Resend, which handle IP warming, DKIM/SPF/DMARC and complaints. Your system handles segments, campaigns and reporting.
Let’s size this for your company
Tell us which tool you pay for and roughly what volumes you handle. We’ll come back with an honest estimate and tell you if switching to another vendor makes more sense than building.
