Dispatch
Scheduled Sep 21, 2026Campaign email at cost, on reputation you build.
Replaces
- Mailchimp · Intuit Inc. — $350 per org per month (Premium), about $4,200/yr at 400 seats
- Klaviyo · Klaviyo, Inc. — no published list price
Rented, per year
$4,200
Mailchimp list price at 400 seats.
Owned, per year
$12,960
AWS infrastructure only. Azure is $17,040.
Build
9 weeks
2 engineers. To parity on the core features above, including suppression-list migration, domain authentication, and a supervised IP warm-up running alongside the incumbent for the first six weeks.
Difficulty
4/5
Substantial. Compliance or realtime depth involved.
Reference organisation: 250,000 contacts, 6 million messages a month, 2 dedicated IPs, 18 months of event retention, single region, prod + non-prod. SES at $0.10 per 1,000 outbound emails plus two standard dedicated IPs at $24.95 each. 3-year Compute Savings Plan on Fargate / 3-year reservation on Container Apps. Aurora minimum 1 ACU in prod. Azure figure assumes a third-party sender for campaign volume at published marketplace rates and excludes any negotiated discount. Excludes Virtual Deliverability Manager at $1,250 a month, which is optional. Figures are infrastructure only, including SES delivery charges, and exclude the build.
What it is
Dispatch is a campaign email system: audiences and segments, template composition, send scheduling, throttled delivery, bounce and complaint handling, and the deliverability instrumentation you need to keep landing in inboxes. It is aimed at organisations sending more than about two million messages a month, where the marginal cost of a send through Mailchimp or Klaviyo has become several hundred times the marginal cost of the same send through SES. It is also the honest one in this catalogue: replacing an email vendor means taking on sender reputation, and that is a ninety-day project before it is an asset.
Why this one stops making sense
- Amazon SES charges $0.10 per 1,000 emails. Two million messages a month is $200 of delivery. Mailchimp Premium starts at $350 a month and rises with contact count long before you reach that volume.
- You are billed for storing contacts you do not email. The distinction between an active profile and a stored one is a pricing lever, not a technical constraint.
- Send data — opens, clicks, bounces, complaints, unsubscribes — is the raw material for every deliverability decision you make, and it is exported to you as summary CSVs rather than events.
- Suppression lists are the highest-risk dataset in marketing. A missed unsubscribe is a regulatory problem, and it lives in a system you cannot audit.
- Klaviyo publishes no fixed list price, only a calculator keyed to your own list size, which means the vendor's pricing conversation always begins with your growth.
What ships
- Audience and segment builder over the same contact model as Beacon and Relay
- MJML-based template composition with brand components and per-brand sending domains
- Scheduled and triggered sends with time-zone-aware delivery windows
- Rate-shaped delivery with per-receiving-domain throttles and automatic backoff on 4xx
- Bounce, complaint and unsubscribe handling with an account-wide suppression list
- Link tracking, open tracking and per-message event streams retained as raw rows
- A/B and multivariate subject and content testing with holdout groups
- Deliverability dashboard: per-domain reputation, complaint rate, bounce rate, DMARC aggregate reports
- Dedicated IP pools with a documented warm-up schedule and automatic ramp enforcement
- One-click unsubscribe (RFC 8058), list-unsubscribe headers and per-purpose preference handling
Data model
Stack
- frontend
- Next.js 15 App Router + Tailwind + a block editor over MJML
- backend
- NestJS on Node 22 — campaign API, a send scheduler and a rate-shaping dispatcher
- database
- PostgreSQL 16 with message events in a daily-partitioned table and monthly detach
- cache
- Redis 7 for suppression lookups, per-domain token buckets and idempotency keys
- queue
- BullMQ for render and send fan-out; a separate queue per IP pool
- auth
- OIDC against the customer IdP
- search
- PostgreSQL tsvector over campaigns and templates
- ai
- Optional subject-line variants and spam-signal linting through an LLM gateway
Parity, honestly
What we match, and what we do not.
The rows marked No are the important ones. If one of them is the reason you bought Mailchimp, keep buying it — and we will tell you that on the first call rather than the fifth month.
| Capability | Mailchimp | Ours | Note |
|---|---|---|---|
| Segmentation and audience building | Yes | Yes | SQL-backed, so a segment can be anything you can express against your own data. |
| Template editor | Yes | Partial | Dispatch ships a block editor over MJML components. Mailchimp's drag-and-drop editor is more forgiving for non-technical users, and we do not match it. |
| Scheduled and triggered campaigns | Yes | Yes | — |
| Bounce, complaint and suppression handling | Yes | Yes | SNS or Event Grid events into a single suppression table with a full history. |
| Raw per-message event data | Partial | Yes | Every open, click, bounce and complaint is a row you own, not a number in a report. |
| Cost per thousand messages at volume | No | Yes | $0.10 per 1,000 on SES against a per-contact subscription that ignores whether you sent anything. |
| Shared-IP sending reputation built by the vendor | Yes | No | This is the real gap and the reason to think hard. Mailchimp and Klaviyo send from pools whose reputation with Gmail, Microsoft and Yahoo took years and billions of messages to build. You cannot buy that, you cannot inherit it, and on day one your dedicated IPs have no reputation at all. Budget ninety days of warm-up and expect worse inbox placement during it. |
| Ecommerce platform integrations out of the box | Yes | No | Klaviyo's value is largely its Shopify, BigCommerce and Magento integrations and the prebuilt flows on top of them. If that is why you bought it, replacing it is a poor trade. |
| Deliverability consulting and vendor escalation to mailbox providers | Yes | No | Large senders can get a human at Mailchimp to escalate a Gmail issue. Your own postmaster relationships start at zero. AWS sells Virtual Deliverability Manager at $1,250 a month, which is one way to buy part of this back. |
| Predictive send-time and engagement scoring | Yes | Partial | We ship send-time optimisation from your own engagement history. It needs about six months of data before it beats sending at 09:00. |
| SMS and push channels in the same product | Yes | Partial | Dispatch does email properly. SMS through Pinpoint or Communication Services is a separate two-week addition. |
| Prebuilt template gallery | Yes | No | You get your own design system as components. There is no gallery of hundreds. |
| One-click unsubscribe and list-unsubscribe headers | Yes | Yes | RFC 8058 compliant, which Gmail and Yahoo now require of bulk senders. |
| DMARC aggregate report ingestion and reporting | Partial | Yes | Dispatch parses rua reports into your own database, which most campaign tools do not do at all. |
Reference architecture
Built twice, on purpose.
Every application in Techtons ships with a production architecture for AWS and one for Azure, using the same diagram grammar so you can read them side by side. Your cloud, your account, your bill.
Amazon Web Services
- Compute
- ECS Fargate (api, scheduler, dispatcher, event-consumer) behind an ALB
- Data
- Aurora Serverless v2 PostgreSQL, ElastiCache Redis
- Storage and edge
- S3 for rendered message archives, DMARC reports and click-stream cold storage
- Identity
- Cognito federated to the customer IdP
- Observability
- CloudWatch and OpenTelemetry, with complaint rate and per-domain deferral rate as paged alarms
- Infrastructure as code
- Terraform, one module per environment
Services
The decision worth arguing about
The decision that matters is not which queue to use, it is when to move off shared IPs, and the honest answer is later than clients expect. A dedicated IP with no history performs worse than SES's shared pool, because mailbox providers treat an unknown IP more harshly than a known-mediocre one; we therefore start every deployment on shared IPs and only provision a dedicated pool once the domain is reliably sending above roughly 100,000 messages a week, since below that volume there is not enough traffic to keep an IP warm and it goes cold between campaigns. When we do move, SES offers two shapes with a genuine trade-off. Standard dedicated IPs cost $24.95 per IP per month and you own the ramp: a 30 to 45 day schedule that starts at a few thousand messages a day and doubles roughly every third day, sent to your most engaged segment first. Managed dedicated IPs cost $15 per month per account plus $0.08 per 1,000 emails and AWS runs the ramp for you, which removes the most common failure mode — a marketer scheduling the full list on day four — at the cost of any control over pace. We default to managed for teams without a deliverability owner, and standard pools for teams that have one. Either way the account-level suppression list stays on, complaint notifications go to SNS and then SQS, and we alarm at a 0.1 percent complaint rate rather than waiting for the 0.3 percent at which Gmail starts throttling.
Microsoft Azure
- Compute
- Container Apps (api, scheduler, dispatcher, event-consumer) with KEDA scaling on queue depth
- Data
- PostgreSQL Flexible Server, Azure Cache for Redis
- Storage and edge
- Blob Storage for message archives and DMARC reports, Front Door for the console
- Identity
- Microsoft Entra ID directly
- Observability
- Azure Monitor and Application Insights, with delivery and complaint metrics as alert rules
- Infrastructure as code
- Bicep, azd-compatible layout
Services
The decision worth arguing about
Azure is the weaker of the two clouds for this specific workload and we will not pretend otherwise. Azure Communication Services Email sends from Microsoft-managed infrastructure with custom-domain support and Event Grid delivery events, which is genuinely good for transactional mail, but it does not expose the self-serve dedicated IP pools and per-IP warm-up controls that SES does, and sending-volume increases are raised as support requests rather than configured. For a campaign sender that wants to own its reputation, the practical Azure shape is Communication Services for transactional mail plus a third-party sender — SendGrid or Mailgun, both available through the Azure Marketplace — for campaigns, with Dispatch's dispatcher abstracting the two behind one interface. The trade-off is that you now have two sending identities and two reputations, and DMARC alignment becomes something you have to actively manage: both senders must be authorised in the same SPF record, both must sign with DKIM keys under the sending domain, and the aggregate reports must be read together or you will be looking at half the picture. If a client is Azure-first and email volume is the point of the project, we say so early: run Dispatch's control plane on Azure and its delivery path on SES, because the reputation tooling is where the difference actually is.
Sources
Every price on this page, with the page we read it from and the date we read it.
| Product | Plan | List price | Checked | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Mailchimp | Premium | $350 / org/month | 2026-09-05 | mailchimp.com/pricing/marketing/ The published Premium rate on the 12-month plan. Mailchimp prices by contact volume across tiers from 500 to 1,000,000+ contacts, so the rate rises with list size; lists above the published tiers are directed to sales. |
| Klaviyo | Not published | 2026-09-05 | www.klaviyo.com/pricing Klaviyo publishes pricing only through an interactive calculator on its pricing page that renders client-side and is keyed to active profile count and monthly send volume. No fixed list price is quoted in the page we checked, so we do not publish a number. |
Should you still be paying for Mailchimp?
Two weeks, fixed price. We audit what you actually use, map it against Dispatch, cost the replacement on your own AWS or Azure account, and give you a delivery plan. If the honest answer is to keep the licence, that is what the report will say.