The Broadcast Blog
Notes from building a self-hosted email platform
Technical deep-dives, design decisions, and lessons from the Broadcast team — written for developers who care about how things actually work.
Ask AI: An Email Marketing Assistant You Actually Own
Broadcast shipped an in-app AI assistant in v2.12. You bring your own key and pick the model. Subscriber data never leaves your server. There’s no AI tier. Here’s how it works.
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Your SPF Record Will Break When You Least Expect It
Broadcast monitors your SPF, DKIM, and DMARC records continuously and alerts you when a healthy record breaks. Built in, no separate monitoring subscription.
Email Marketing Software Your AI Agent Can Actually Drive
How Broadcast 2.0 exposes a first-class surface for AI agents like Claude Code to discover, configure, and operate a self-hosted email marketing platform.
Autopilot: The Newsletter That Writes Its First Draft Itself
Autopilot drafts your newsletter from GitHub commits, RSS feeds, and web pages, in your voice, with a review step before anything sends. Ships in the license.
Making Broadcast Sends Bulletproof: Safe to Crash, Safe to Retry, Safe to Resume
How Broadcast v2.12 made bulk sending idempotent, retryable, and resumable with Postgres constraints and Active Job. A technical walkthrough.
Double Opt-In Without the Straitjacket
Double opt-in in Broadcast: API-first confirmation, editable templates, six customizable page states, and redirects to your own domain.
Your List, Your Data Model
How Broadcast treats subscribers as records you shape: custom data fields, opt-in form blocks, CSV column mapping, and typed segmentation with self-updating relative date rules.
The True Cost of Email Marketing at Scale (2026)
A three-year cost comparison of email marketing as your list grows from 1k to 100k subscribers: Mailchimp, Beehiiv, and ConvertKit subscriptions vs. self-hosted Broadcast.
Why We Sell a One-Time License in a Subscription World
Why Broadcast is sold as a one-time license instead of a subscription: the incentive alignment, the trade-offs, and what owning your software actually means.
EU Data Sovereignty for Email Marketers in 2026: The Regulatory Floor Just Moved Again
A developer’s read on EU data sovereignty for email marketing in 2026: DPF, CLOUD Act, NIS2, and what self-hosting actually fixes.
E2E Email Provider Testing in Rails CI: Verifying Emails Actually Arrive
A technical deep-dive into building end-to-end email provider tests that verify actual email delivery in CI pipelines.
Building Self-Hosting Rails Applications: Design Decisions & Why
Technical deep-dive into the design decisions that make Broadcast a truly self-hostable Rails application.
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