The Migadu alternative
you actually own.

Why teams move to Vectis Mail

The flat-rate ethos, upgraded to ownership.

One honest scope note: Vectis Mail is self-hosted, not zero-ops. You run a Linux VPS (typically ~$20/month) and you're the one on the hook if the box falls over — the orchestrator automates updates, rollback and backups to make that tractable, but the server is yours to own.

At a glance

Side-by-side, current as of July 2026.

Migadu plan prices and daily limits per Migadu's published pricing, retrieved 2026-06-21. Vectis Mail Starter is free self-hosted (up to 3 domains, 25 mailboxes/domain); Pro is $39 USD/tenant/month plus the VPS it runs on (typically ~$20/month).

How they differ

The same flat-rate model

This is the common ground, and it's real. Migadu broke from the per-mailbox model the rest of the industry runs on: you pay by usage tier (Micro, Mini, Standard, Maxi), and every tier gives you unlimited domains, unlimited mailboxes, and unlimited aliases. No "$5 per user per month" creeping up as your team grows. Vectis Mail shares that exact belief — Pro is a flat $39/month per tenant for unlimited domains, unlimited mailboxes, and unlimited send volume, and Starter is genuinely $0 for up to 3 domains and 25 mailboxes per domain. Neither product charges you for the act of adding an address. If per-mailbox billing felt wrong to you, you already believe the thing Vectis is built on.

Ownership vs hosted — the honest core

Migadu is a hosted service: the infrastructure runs in Switzerland, and you never touch a server. But hosted means tenancy, and tenancy carries provider risk: a provider can change its terms, raise prices, get acquired, deprecate a feature, or have an outage — and you ride along with whatever they decide. That risk is structural: it exists because the servers aren't yours.

Vectis Mail removes that category of risk by removing the landlord. The server is on a VPS you own. Your mailboxes live on your filesystem; your audit trail and metadata live in your Postgres. There is no upstream account to be cancelled, no terms-of-service to be rewritten, no acquisition to absorb. If Veltara Works vanished tomorrow, your mail server keeps running on your box — and the Business Source License auto-converts to Apache 2.0 after four years, so the code is yours too. That's the difference between renting and owning.

What you actually run yourself

Let's be honest about the cost of ownership, because self-hosting is not free of effort. With Vectis Mail you run a Linux VPS (typically ~$20/month), you point DNS at it, and you are the one on the hook if the box falls over. The orchestrator is what makes that tractable rather than a second job: updates run as an atomic six-phase pipeline that snapshots first and rolls back automatically if a health check fails; backups are scheduled; DKIM, SPF, DMARC, MTA-STS and TLS certificates are generated and renewed for you. So the day-to-day is closer to "watch a dashboard" than "hand-edit Postfix at 2am." But it is still your server, and the trade is real: ownership in exchange for owning a VPS. Don't let anyone tell you self-hosting is effortless — the payoff is that nobody but you controls the stack.

The API + webhooks Migadu doesn't offer

Migadu has an admin REST API that covers creating and managing accounts, domains, mailboxes, and aliases programmatically. Sending happens over standard SMTP submission with mailbox credentials. What Migadu does not ship is a transactional API: there's no domain-scoped sending-key endpoint, no delivery-event webhooks, and no inbound-parse webhooks that POST received mail into your application.

Vectis Mail does. Its 40+ endpoint REST API covers domain-scoped sending keys (single and batch, with attachments), per-domain analytics, and inbound webhooks that deliver the full parsed message — body, HTML, attachments, SMTP envelope — to your endpoint, HMAC-SHA256 signed with exponential-backoff retry. That makes Vectis usable as a programmable mail pipeline for an app, not just a mailbox host: a self-hosted SendGrid-style surface and your team's mailboxes on one server. See the API Reference for the full surface.

Daily limits vs your own headroom

Migadu's per-plan daily message caps — from roughly 200 in / 20 out on Micro up to 10,000 in / 2,000 out on Maxi — exist because it's a shared service and they protect everyone's deliverability. On your own Vectis Mail box there's no plan-tier cap at all: your throughput is bounded by the VPS you sized and the receiving-side reputation you build, not by which subscription you bought. The flip side, honestly stated, is that reputation is nowyour job — a cold IP needs a warmup window before high outbound volume. SeeWill my mail land? for the full picture.

Migrating from Migadu to Vectis Mail

Migadu speaks plain IMAP, so the mail data moves cleanly. The typical sequence:

1. Stand up Vectis Mail on a fresh VPS following the installation guide. Recreate your domains and mailboxes, but leave DNS pointed at Migadu for now.
2. Sync mailbox data with imapsync from Migadu's IMAP servers into Vectis Mail. Both ends are standard IMAP, so messages, folders and flags transfer directly.
3. Publish new DNS records: Vectis Mail generates your DKIM/SPF/DMARC/MTA-STS values. Add them alongside the existing Migadu records during the switchover.
4. Cut the MX over to the Vectis Mail server once you've verified delivery in both directions. Inbound mail starts flowing through Vectis as DNS propagates.
5. Warm the IP before high outbound volume — a fresh VPS IP has no reputation on day one. The deliverability guide covers the warmup calendar.
6. Verify + close the Migadu account: watch logs for a few days, confirm nothing is still routing through Migadu, then cancel.

Realistic timeline: a short cutover window during DNS propagation for a small install, or a staged migration over a few days for many domains and mailboxes.

Frequently asked questions