Why we sell a one-time license
Every incentive in software points at subscriptions. Here is the reasoning behind charging once instead, what it costs us, and the specific commitments that make a perpetual license mean something.
Selva Mail costs $497. Once. There is an optional $79 a year after that, and if you never pay it the software keeps working forever.
That is an unusual choice in 2026, and the reasonable first reaction is to wonder what the catch is. So here is the reasoning, including the parts that are worse for us.
The problem with charging by the contact
The dominant pricing model in email is per contact. You pay for the size of your list, every month, whether you send to it or not.
Follow that through and it produces some strange outcomes. Your bill goes up when your newsletter does well and you have not sent anything yet. A list that doubles doubles your cost with no change in what the software does. And in at least one major platform, contacts who unsubscribed keep counting toward your tier until you go and delete them by hand — their own support tells people to prune inactive contacts to lower the bill.
That is not a pricing bug, it is the model working as designed. Per-contact pricing means the vendor’s revenue grows with your list, which sounds like alignment and is closer to a toll.
There is a version of this that is defensible: the vendor is genuinely carrying more cost as your list grows. But the marginal cost of storing another email address is effectively zero, and the marginal cost of sending another email is about a hundredth of a cent. The price is not tracking the cost. It is tracking your success.
What we charge for instead
Selva Mail runs on your AWS account and sends through your own Amazon SES. So AWS bills you for what you actually send — roughly $0.12 per thousand emails all in, including Lambda and the queue — and we bill you once for the software.
At 50,000 emails a month that is about $6 of infrastructure. At two million it is about $240. Your cost tracks your usage, because it is your usage, paid directly to the company providing it.
We are not in that transaction. We wrote the software; you own a copy.
What this costs us, honestly
It would be dishonest to present this as pure principle. It has real downsides for us, and they are worth naming.
Revenue is lumpy. Subscription businesses can forecast. We cannot. Every month starts at zero and depends on people finding us and deciding to buy.
No expansion revenue. When a customer grows from 5,000 contacts to 500,000, a per-contact competitor’s revenue from that account goes up roughly a hundredfold. Ours does not move. We captured all of it at $497.
Support is unbounded. A subscription creates a natural, ongoing exchange for support. A one-time sale does not, and someone who bought two years ago has exactly the same claim on our attention as someone who bought this morning.
We have to keep earning attention. With a subscription, a customer who forgets about you keeps paying. With a one-time license, we have to be worth finding again.
That last one is the trade. The subscription model is popular partly because forgetting to cancel is a business model. We would rather not build on that.
What makes a perpetual license mean anything
“Perpetual” gets used loosely. There is a well-documented case of a company selling a “perpetual license” with one year of updates, and then, when a customer reinstalled their operating system, declining to provide the installer for the version they had bought. Support confirmed the customer still had the legal right to use it. They simply could not get it. The thread about it ran to over a hundred comments, most of them variations on the same point: a license you cannot exercise is not a license.
So it seems worth being specific about what we are actually committing to.
You get the source. Not a binary, not obfuscated code. You can read it, audit it, and change it. The closest comparable product in this category ships obfuscated PHP, and its users spend a certain amount of energy speculating about what the obfuscated parts phone home about. That seemed like a bad thing to inherit.
There is no license check. No key that validates against our server, no telemetry required to operate, no expiry, and no mechanism by which we could switch off software you have already deployed. This is not restraint on our part — we deliberately did not build the capability, because the capability is the risk.
You keep an archive. At purchase you get a downloadable copy of your version. Repository access covers future versions; the archive is the one you bought. If we disappear tomorrow, you still have working software and the code it is built from.
Renewal buys support, not access. The $79 is for continued email support. Your license, your repository access and every update we publish do not depend on it. We considered gating updates behind renewal and decided against it: it makes the renewal feel like a hostage situation, and the amount of money involved does not justify the bad feeling.
Who this is a bad deal for
If you send a few hundred emails a month and your list is tiny, a free tier somewhere will serve you better than paying us $497. That is a genuine recommendation, not false modesty — the arithmetic does not work in our favour until you are paying somebody meaningfully more than nothing.
If you want a vendor to own your deliverability, take your support calls at 2am and be accountable when something breaks, a managed provider is a reasonable thing to want and we are not it. Selva Mail runs on your infrastructure, which means the operational responsibility is yours.
And if you are not willing to have an AWS account, this is not for you. That is the whole architecture.
Where the arithmetic turns
Roughly: if you are paying a per-contact platform more than about $40 a month, the license pays for itself inside a year. Most people asking the question are paying considerably more than that.
You can check your own numbers rather than take ours. It will tell you if the saving is small.
Selva Mail is $497, once. See what’s included.
