Show HN: I built an open-source email builder, alternative to Beefree/Unlayer

Great idea. I starred this on GitHub, where by the way for those are interested, your star will be statistically significant (only about 100 now).

https://github.com/templatical/sdk

As someone who built a similar open source project (grapesjs), this looks really good

Even with LLMs, generating raw HTML emails that render correctly across major email clients is still surprisingly hard, so great choice going with MJML.

Picking MJML as the output format instead of raw HTML is the move. That's the layer where the cross-client pain has already been solved by people more patient than any of us.

Two questions:

1. How extensible is the block system? Can consumers define their own block types with custom MJML output, or are you limited to the built-ins?

2. Any plans for a headless render path (JSON → MJML → HTML on a server) for transactional emails generated from templates at send time?

Either way, bookmarking. Been waiting for someone to do this without the SaaS tax.

This is cool!

I looked for this in the past. This is the main reason we bothered with mailchimp/hubspot -- simply the ability for nontechnical marketing people to put together nice emails, and the trust that we won't need an engineer to troubleshoot email formatting on their behalf. I remember trying some OSS tools at the time (8 years ago?) and there were some templates we used but then when we wanted to modify them, the broken-ness of email html/css standards made it really hard to test.

I know the standards and practice around this are a moving target, though, so I hope you can find a model to sustain and expand this, without charging for delivery/contact list numbers like MailChimp or other incumbents.

The migration page is so good. Being stuck in Unlayer is a real thing, and seeing a clear path out makes this much more tempting to adopt.

This is great a great idea !! I starred it on github.

This is really awesome. I'm showing this to my marketing team - we were looking for something similar in the past too. I've had the pleasure of attempting to build fancy marketing emails and a signature and I never wanna look at a Word Table in my life again.

This looks great! So glad the output is MJML. I will have to see how I can embed it in the project I am working on as I have been wanting to add the feature for clients to build out their own emails or customize some of the standard templates. It will at least be a big help in my own admin UI to start.

I was thinking this is so nice but too bad I can't use it because I'm so deep into Unlayer. Then I see the the migration page :)

This is great, i've been wanting someone to do this for a while, and was tempted to myself

I got you a gold star ;) Excited to use this, as I've been frustrated by vendor lock-in for this exact use case.

Looks good! Do you have an MCP or API in your roadmap? The reason: managing a lot of templates and their placeholders can get out of hand pretty quickly and agents can be a good way to deal with the complexity.

I'd love to try this with sendops.dev although I'm not sure how it's going to work with the git backed templating it has.

What do you use for the onboarding guide?

Really cool work. Quick question: is this built on top of React Email?

This is really nice, thanks for building. I will use that heavily :)

does it store our data persistently on your server/system

Hi looks nice. I am in the process of building a email management system for a client with a small coaching base, and decided to go with Maily to integrate with the React and resend stack.

I hadn't heard of beefree or unlayer before this post. What would you say are the reasons we would want to use Templatical over our current integration or Beefree/unlayer?

Thanks.

Looks like a grapes fork?

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