Self-hosted PHP newsletter & autoresponder
Your autoresponder should not bill you every month for the rest of your life.
Rilato Autoresponder is a complete mailing-list and autoresponder system that installs on your own server in about eight minutes. Unlimited subscribers. Unlimited sends. Unlimited lists. One payment, and the software is yours.
Instant download · 60-day money-back guarantee · Full PHP source, nothing encoded
What a hosted autoresponder costs you
Compared against the cheapest of the three, not the average — the conservative number is the one worth trusting. Vendor list prices checked 24 Jul 2026. Our column includes a realistic $96/yr for a small VPS and an SMTP relay, because pretending self-hosting is free would be dishonest.
The part nobody mentions at signup
The monthly fee is not the expensive part.
The expensive part is what happens on the day the relationship ends — and you are not the one who decides when that is.
The bill grows with the asset
Every platform above charges by contact count. Build the list and the price climbs with it — and most of them bill you for unsubscribed and bounced contacts too, until you manually clean them out. Your reward for succeeding is a larger invoice, forever, for software you will never own a line of.
The account can close without you
A compliance review, a complaint spike, a policy change about your niche — and access to the list you spent years building is gone while a support ticket sits in a queue. When the database is on your own server, nobody can lock you out of your own subscribers. There is no account to suspend.
To be fair about it: self-hosting moves that risk onto you. You become responsible for your own deliverability, your own backups and your own cron jobs. The next section is mostly about the tools Rilato Autoresponder gives you to carry it.
What Rilato Autoresponder actually is
A full email platform, in a folder you upload.
Not a stripped-down script that sends a form to your inbox. This is the whole machine: double opt-in, sequences, broadcasts, segmentation, tracking, bounce handling, DKIM signing, and an admin panel to run it from your phone.
Subscribers live in your MySQL
One table on your server. Export it, back it up, query it, move it to another host at 3am on a Sunday. No API limits, no export queue, no permission needed.
The price does not move
Ten subscribers or a hundred thousand: the software costs the same, which is nothing, because you already paid. Your only variable cost is what your SMTP relay charges to deliver.
Plain, readable PHP
Nothing is encoded or obfuscated. No Composer, no vendor directory, no licence server phoning home. Open a file, read it, change it. It is yours.
The full specification
Everything in the box.
Written out in full, because if you are the kind of buyer who reads the spec before the sales copy, a vague feature list is the reason you close the tab.
Lists, forms and subscribers
the front door- Unlimited lists, each with its own from-name, from-address and opt-in policy
- Forced double opt-in on every public signup, with unconfirmed rows auto-purged after 72 hours
- Copy-paste embed forms — a styled HTML form or a zero-config iframe, generated per list
- Subscribe by email — give a list its own inbox and anyone who mails it joins
- First name, last name, IP captured everywhere, plus unlimited custom fields
- CSV and paste import with delimiter auto-detection and extra columns kept as merge fields
- Preference centre so subscribers can pause one list instead of leaving entirely
- Blocked-address patterns, global or per list, plain text or full regex
Sending and automation
the engine- Autoresponder sequences keyed to days after confirmation, idempotent so nobody is ever mailed twice
- Broadcast campaigns queued and sent in throttled batches by cron
- Conditional branching — if they opened message A send B, if not send C
- Behavioural triggers that tag someone or move them to a list the instant they open or click
- Dynamic content blocks — [[if tag:vip]]…[[else]]…[[endif]] inside any message
- Spintax resolved fresh per subscriber, so no two recipients get identical wording
- A/B testing on a sample, auto-decided by open or click rate, winner blasted to the remainder
- Multi-process sending with row-level locking, plus a configurable delay between messages
Deliverability and compliance
the part that decides whether any of it matters- DKIM signing built from scratch against RFC 6376 and verified with an independent library
- RFC 8058 one-click unsubscribe headers — the Gmail and Yahoo bulk-sender requirement
- Bounce processing over IMAP, classifying hard and soft bounces from DSN codes
- Feedback-loop (FBL) processing that parses ARF complaints and permanently bans the address
- Inactive subscriber detection with reversible pausing, manual or fully automatic
- Spam-word checker that scans subject and body live as you type
- IP and domain warmup scheduler that ramps a new sending account up day by day
- GDPR export and erasure across every table, plus a managed suppression list
Reporting, targeting and security
the cockpit- Open and click tracking auto-injected, with per-link breakdowns and a named “who clicked” table
- Inline SVG charts generated in PHP — open-rate trend, engagement velocity, subscriber growth
- Tags that cut across lists, applied individually or in bulk
- Saved segments combining tag and custom-field conditions with ALL or ANY logic
- Multiple SMTP accounts with randomised per-campaign rotation
- TOTP two-factor auth and IP-keyed login rate limiting with a trusted-IP allowlist
- Cron heartbeat alerts that flag a job the moment it goes quiet
- Structured activity log filterable by category, level and free text — plus dark mode
The honest install
Upload, visit setup.php, answer six questions.
There is no .sql file to import by hand. The schema is defined in PHP and installed by a WordPress-style wizard.
# upload the folder, then in your browser: https://yourdomain.com/setup.php # it asks for: database host, name, user, password ← creates the tables admin username and password ← creates your login your base URL and first list ← you are live # then click "Lock this installer for me". Done.
* * * * * php /path/to/cron/broadcaster.php */5 * * * * php /path/to/cron/autoresponder.php */5 * * * * php /path/to/cron/email_subscribe.php 7 * * * * php /path/to/cron/purge_unconfirmed.php 17 */6 * * * php /path/to/cron/bounce_processor.php 23 */6 * * * php /path/to/cron/fbl_processor.php 30 3 * * * php /path/to/cron/pause_inactive.php 0 6 * * * php /path/to/cron/send_digest.php */15 * * * * php /path/to/cron/process_ab_tests.php
That is the whole deployment. If a cron line is ever wrong or silently stops, the Settings page tells you — every job writes a heartbeat, and a stale one gets flagged in amber before you notice missing emails.
Straight answer on requirements: you need PHP 8.3 or newer, MySQL 8 or MariaDB 10.6, the pdo_mysql, openssl, imap and json extensions, cron access, and an SMTP account to send through. Most shared cPanel plans have all of this. If yours does not, the guarantee covers you.
Where it fits
An honest side-by-side.
Including the columns where a hosted platform genuinely wins. You should know what you are giving up before you decide, not after.
| Rilato Autoresponder | Hosted platform | Free open-source script | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cost at 25,000 subscribers | One payment | $179–$599 every month | Free |
| Who holds the database | You do | They do | You do |
| Account can be suspended | No account exists | Yes | No account exists |
| DKIM, FBL and bounce handling | Built in | Built in | Usually not |
| Setup effort | Upload + wizard + cron | Sign up | Often a full dev project |
| Who owns deliverability | You | They do — a real advantage | You |
| Support when something breaks | Email us | Staffed helpdesk | A GitHub issue, maybe |
| Dependencies to maintain | None — no Composer | N/A | Often dozens |
If you send fewer than a thousand emails a month and never want to think about a server, a hosted platform is the better buy and we would rather tell you now than process a refund later.
What buyers say
Proof goes here.
Invented testimonials violate the FTC Endorsement Guides and both ClickBank's and Hotmart's listing rules, and a fake one is the single fastest way to lose a technical audience. Get real ones first: give ten free copies to developers in exchange for an honest review, keep the negative sentences in, and use full names with a linkable site. Then delete this box.
“[REPLACE — a quote about the money. The strongest ones name a specific figure and a specific former platform.]”
“[REPLACE — a quote about the install. Ideally from someone who says it took less time than they expected, on named shared hosting.]”
“[REPLACE — a quote about the code quality, from a developer. Leave in the one thing they wished were different; it makes the other two believable.]”
Included, not upsold
Four things that ship with it.
Each one exists because it answers a question people ask before buying, not because a longer bonus list looks better.
The Deliverability Setup Guide
SPF, DKIM and DMARC records written out for the common DNS panels, in the order that avoids breaking your existing mail. The part most self-hosters get wrong.
A 12-message welcome sequence
Written, ready to paste into the Messages screen with day offsets already suggested. Change the nouns and you have a working funnel on day one.
The migration worksheet
Exporting cleanly from a hosted platform, which fields map to which columns, and how to re-permission a list you have not mailed in a while without torching your reputation.
Free updates for version 1.0.x
Every point release, delivered by email. Upgrading is one command: php sync_schema.php adds anything missing and never touches existing data.
Pricing
Pay once. That is the whole pricing page.
No per-subscriber tier, no send limit, no seat count, no renewal.
Single site
- Full source, nothing encoded
- Unlimited subscribers and lists
- All four bonuses
- Free 1.0.x updates
- Email support
Developer
- Everything in Single site
- Install on five separate domains
- Use on client projects
- Priority email support
- Free 1.0.x updates on all five
Five domains for $30 more than one.
Agency
- Everything in Developer
- Unlimited installs, yours or clients'
- Rebrand the admin panel
- Install it as a paid service
- Free 1.0.x updates, unlimited
Secure checkout · Instant download · Cards and PayPal
60 days. Install it first, decide afterwards.
Put it on your server. Import a list. Run a real sequence. If it does not do what this page said, or your host turns out to be missing something it needs, email support@mailinglistmarketer.com inside 60 days and you get every cent back. You do not have to explain why, and there is nothing to uninstall or return — we would rather refund one person than argue with them.
Before you buy
The questions people actually ask.
Will this run on my cheap shared hosting?
Almost certainly, if it gives you PHP 8.3+, MySQL, cron access and the imap extension. The whole project is dependency-free on purpose — the SMTP client, the DKIM signer, the two-factor auth and the charts were all written from scratch specifically so there is no Composer step and no extension your host might not have.
One honest caveat: multi-process sending needs proc_open(), which some shared hosts disable. If yours does, the script notices, logs why, and sends single-process instead. Nothing breaks.
Does it send the email itself, or do I still need an SMTP service?
You still need an SMTP account. Rilato Autoresponder is the list, the sequences, the segmentation and the reporting — the actual delivery goes through whatever you point it at: your host's mail server, Amazon SES, Postmark, Brevo, a Gmail account for small lists, anything that speaks SMTP.
That is deliberate. It is also why the cost meter above includes a hosting and relay figure rather than pretending the running cost is zero.
How much of a headache is deliverability really?
It is the genuine trade-off, and no script can remove it. What this one does is give you every lever a hosted platform would be pulling on your behalf: DKIM signing with a live DNS verification check, RFC 8058 one-click unsubscribe headers, IMAP bounce classification, ARF complaint processing that permanently bans a complainer, inactive-subscriber pausing, a warmup scheduler for a new sending domain, and a spam-word checker that runs as you type.
Set the DNS records up properly on day one and mail people who asked to hear from you. That is most of it.
Is the code encoded, licence-locked or phoning home?
No, no and no. Every file is plain readable PHP. There is no ionCube, no Zend Guard, no licence key check, no callback to our server. If we vanished tomorrow your installation would keep running exactly as it does today.
I am already on a hosted platform with 8,000 subscribers. Can I move?
Yes. Export to CSV, then use the bulk import on Admin → Subscribers. It auto-detects comma, semicolon and tab delimiters, recognises first/last name header columns, and turns any extra columns into custom merge fields. Imported addresses are marked confirmed rather than re-triggering double opt-in, since consent was captured on the old platform.
The migration worksheet included with your purchase covers the part that matters more: how to warm a new sending domain and re-engage a list gradually instead of blasting 8,000 people on day one from an unknown IP.
What happens when PHP 8.5 lands and something breaks?
Point releases are free for the whole 1.0.x line and arrive by email. Upgrading is: upload the new files, run php sync_schema.php once. It adds any missing tables or columns and never touches existing data, so it is safe to run repeatedly.
Is there a demo?
You are using it. The opt-in form at the bottom of every article on this site is the copy-paste embed code from a live Rilato Autoresponder install, and the confirmation email it sends you was queued by cron/broadcaster.php. Subscribe to something and watch the double opt-in, the one-click unsubscribe header in Gmail, and the preference centre work.
Can I get a refund if I just do not like it?
Yes. 60 days, no reason required, no forms. Email support@mailinglistmarketer.com.
Last thing
The list is the asset. Keep it where you can reach it.
Every month you stay on a metered plan, you pay again for software you will never own, on a list that lives on somebody else's server. One payment today ends both of those.
Get Rilato Autoresponder — from $67Instant download · 60-day guarantee · Full source included
P.S. Scroll back to the meter and drag it to the list size you expect to have in three years, not the one you have today. That number is what this decision is actually worth — and it is the number that keeps growing whether or not you do anything about it.