A Sendy alternative that skips the VPSThe same SES economics, without a PHP server that is now your job.

Sendy is software you run yourself: a PHP application you install on a VPS, pointed at your own SES account. The license fee is genuinely low, and the sending rate is genuinely SES's own rate. What is not on that price tag is the box. Someone has to provision it, patch the operating system, renew the SSL certificate, take backups, and resize it when a campaign sends bigger than usual. That someone is whoever set it up, indefinitely.

This is not an argument that Sendy is poorly built. It is stable, it has been around long enough to be trusted, and plenty of senders run it for years without drama. The honest difference between Sendy and an installed platform is not code quality. It is who is on call for the box: with Sendy, that is you; with a serverless install, there is no box to be on call for, because there is no VPS.

• Stay on Sendy if you enjoy running your own PHP stack on a VPS and already have the operational habit of patching and monitoring it.
• Stay if a small, cheap server genuinely costs you nothing in time, because your volume is light and the box rarely needs attention.
• Move if the patching, the backups, and the occasional 2am alert are the part of this you would rather not do, and you are willing to click through a one-time AWS install to make the server disappear.

None of this is a knock on running your own box in general. It is a fair way to learn how a mail platform works, and plenty of small operators are genuinely fine carrying that load. The point is only to price it honestly against the alternative, rather than comparing a VPS's hosting bill against a competitor's list price and calling the VPS free.

1. Export your lists and templates from Sendy before touching anything else.
2. Buy SendBunny and complete the one-click AWS install; it replaces the PHP application entirely rather than sitting alongside it.
3. Import the CSV contacts into the new platform.
4. Reconnect your sending domain in SES if the new install needs its own verification.
5. Decommission the Sendy VPS once a real campaign has gone out clean on the new platform.

Templates built in Sendy's editor do not transfer automatically and need to be rebuilt in the new platform's template editor; the list data is what carries over cleanly through CSV.

SendBunny installs with one click as a CloudFormation stack in your own AWS account, no PHP application and no VPS to keep alive. It is a single $199 purchase, with optional $99 yearly updates after the first year, and it sends through your own Amazon SES at Amazon's own rate, about a tenth of a cent per email. The install includes campaigns, automations, a transactional API, a shared inbox, analytics and a template editor, and it auto-scales with load rather than needing a bigger box resized by hand. We never hold your AWS credentials.

Fresh AWS accounts land in the SES sandbox first, where only verified addresses can receive mail. The dashboard shows that status and links to AWS's production-access form, so you can import lists and build campaigns while approval is pending.