We’re excited to introduce two new HYVOR products:
Hyvor Post: a simple, privacy-first newsletter platform. An alternative to Mailchimp, Brevo, and Beehiiv.
Hyvor Relay: a self-hosted email API. An alternative to AWS SES, Mailgun, and SendGrid.
Discuss on Hacker News or Product Hunt (Post / Relay).
Both of them are open-source under AGPLv3. Read the story behind them:
Hyvor Post
One year ago, we introduced newsletters in Hyvor Talk. The feature was well received, but it created an identity challenge for the product. Countless times in support and sales conversations, we heard: “We love Hyvor Talk for comments, what’s this newsletter thing?”
Additionally, Hyvor Talk’s newsletter feature was very minimal. Expanding it with essentials like spam protection, approval workflows, and other advanced options would have required making the Console and API significantly more complex, ultimately raising the barrier for users who simply needed a clean, straightforward commenting system.
And one year ago, we didn’t yet have the foundation to quickly build new products. But now we do. Hyvor Design System makes frontend development a breeze; Hyvor Billing System abstracts all aspects of invoices and subscription handling; Hyvor Internal Library ties everything together. Today, we finally have the infrastructure to manage and launch multiple products with ease.
With all these factors in mind, we decided to build our own dedicated newsletter platform: Hyvor Post.
So why would someone use Hyvor Post? Why not rely on established newsletter platforms? We asked ourselves the same question - until we realized there’s a critical gap in the industry: privacy.
Most newsletter platforms track readers extensively. Beyond the usual open and link tracking, many also use device fingerprinting and IP-based geolocation to determine exactly where and how an email was opened.
Some platforms allow disabling these features, but we take a different approach: Hyvor Post includes no tracking at all. No pixels, no fingerprints, no hidden data collection. We believe this level of transparency builds genuine trust. When a newsletter is sent with Hyvor Post, readers can be confident that absolutely no tracking is happening behind the scenes.
Hyvor Post is intentionally simple. It’s not a full-blown marketing automation platform. It’s just a newsletter platform. Newsletters, lists, subscribers, and issues. Nothing more, nothing less.
Hyvor Post is perfect for privacy-conscious creators, small businesses, and anyone who wants a simple, worry-free way to send newsletters. Visit Hyvor Post to learn more and start a newsletter. You can easily migrate from your current provider.
Hyvor Relay
Just a few weeks into developing Hyvor Post, we ran into a major challenge. Every newsletter platform relies on an underlying service to send emails. They are typically called SMTP services or email APIs. Some examples would be AWS SES, Mailgun, or SendGrid. To maintain our commitment to privacy, the underlying service itself must guarantee it. After evaluating many options, we found that nearly all of them included tracking features. Even if configurable, using them would compromise our strict no-tracking promise.
Our solution was bold: we decided to build our own email API from scratch. That’s how Hyvor Relay was born.
When we started Hyvor Post, we had no idea it would lead to something as ambitious and exciting as Hyvor Relay. We embraced the challenge: exploring cloud and self-hosted solutions, mastering SMTP, and diving deep into RFCs. Almost a year later, Hyvor Relay is fully operational, sending emails that reliably land in inboxes - not spam folders.
The story of Hyvor Relay deserves its own blog post, which I’ll be sharing soon. Here, I’ll highlight just a few key points.
Our first challenge was choosing a programming language. All Hyvor products are written in PHP (formerly Laravel and now Symfony). PHP works great for HTTP applications. But for sending emails efficiently, we needed something with better concurrency. Our top candidates were Rust and Go, and we ultimately chose Go for its simplicity and rich networking and email libraries. We still use Symfony for the API since our internal library handles the basics like HYVOR authentication, OIDC, etc.
Hyvor Relay grew more complex than we initially anticipated:
It is now a combination of an HTTP server, a mail server, a DNS server, email workers, and webhook workers that runs inside a Docker container. It is highly scalable by adding multiple servers and IP addresses. Much of the management is automated through the DNS server and health checks.
Hyvor Relay can currently be self-hosted, while our cloud version is in private beta, with a public release planned for 2026. Visit the website for more details or view source code on Github.
Open-source
Both Hyvor Post and Hyvor Relay are fully open-source under the AGPLv3 license, a first for our team. While our earlier products, Hyvor Talk and Hyvor Blogs, remained closed-source, we wanted these new projects to embrace openness, freedom, and transparency.
We’ve grown passionate about open-source software through self-hosting projects like OpenBao, Authentik, Grafana, and Prometheus. Experiencing the freedom and privacy firsthand inspired us to give the same to our users.
Open-sourcing also helps us achieve wider adoption, which is particularly valuable for building a robust email delivery platform like Hyvor Relay, something that is inherently challenging to do alone. A strong community of self-hosters helps improve the software through bug reports and such while supporting our cloud infrastructure.
We chose AGPLv3 to ensure both developers and self-hosters can freely test, modify, and host the software while maintaining the principles of openness. For organizations that need priority support, SLAs, or want to lift AGPL requirements on modified code, we also offer an Enterprise license.
Importantly, our open-source and Enterprise versions are feature-identical. Unlike typical dual-licensing models, no functionality is restricted based on the license, making it simpler and fairer for everyone. Remember, HYVOR has no VC hand pushing to limit features.
We also plan to release Hyvor Blogs and eventually Hyvor Talk under AGPLv3 in the coming years.
Notes
Hyvor Talk Newsletters is now deprecated and will be removed by May 2026. We do not accept new signups for that feature. You can export your subscribers and move to Hyvor Post or another newsletter platform. Please feel free to contact our support if needed.
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