The open-source Postcards alternative

Why people look for a Postcards alternative

Postcards is one of the best-looking hosted email builders — no point pretending otherwise. The friction is in the terms around it. On the free plan you get 5 exports per month, zero AI credits, no email-client preview, and templates licensed for personal, non-commercial use only, with a Designmodo badge that the Terms explicitly forbid removing or hiding. Commercial use of gallery templates requires a paid plan ($16–$24 per month), and even then templates may not be resold, redistributed or built into other products.

There is also no way to run Postcards yourself: the FAQ states plainly that self-hosting is not supported. The builder lives in Designmodo's cloud, needs an internet connection, and your projects live inside its service.

What Card gives you instead

Card is a free, open-source (AGPL-3.0) email builder developed in the open since 2022. You compose emails from 78 drag-and-drop blocks — the same modular authoring model Postcards uses — and export as much as you like: responsive HTML for your sending platform, plus editable JSON so a design can be reopened and revised months later.

What you export is yours. There is no badge, no commercial-use tier and no template licence between you and your own newsletter — client work included. There is also no account: templates are stored in your browser's local storage, so your designs exist on your machine and in whatever backups you make of the exported JSON, not in a vendor's project list.

And because Card is a static Vue + TypeScript application, you can deploy it under your own domain. If policy says the editing workflow stays on your infrastructure, Card is the version of this product category that can actually comply.

What Postcards still does better

The subscription buys the layer around the canvas. Postcards offers real-time collaboration with comments and version history, AI-assisted generation and translation on paid plans, email-client previews, and one-click export into dozens of sending platforms. Card leaves all of that to you: no cloud workspace, no AI authoring, and the handoff to your ESP is a manual export with an owner and a QA step.

For a ten-person campaign team on deadlines, that layer can be worth far more than $24 a month. For a developer, a solo operator or a small team with its own review habits, it is often paying rent on features a file share and a checklist already cover.

Who should switch — and who shouldn't

Switch to Card if the export caps bite, the badge and non-commercial terms constrain your work, or you need the editor on your own infrastructure with your data under your control. Stay on Postcards if its collaboration, AI tooling and integrations are what your team actually runs on.

The test costs nothing on either side — and on Card's side it doesn't even cost a signup. Open the Card editor, rebuild a real campaign with your assets and footer, export it, and send it through your ESP. Unlimited exports mean you can run that experiment as many times as it takes to be sure.