Marketing automation without enterprise pricing
You don't need HubSpot, Marketo, or a six-figure annual contract to automate your marketing. Here's how we built a full stack for under $50/month.
Most marketing automation platforms are built for enterprises with enterprise budgets. HubSpot starts free, then the real features sit behind a $800/month wall. Marketo wants $1,200/month minimum. Salesforce Marketing Cloud? Don't ask.
Meanwhile, a growing brand that sends 5,000 emails a month and runs three automations doesn't need any of that. They need email that works, triggers that fire, and a contact list they actually own.
The stack we use
We built TEGO's entire marketing infrastructure on four pillars:
AWS SES for sending. $0.10 per 1,000 emails. No minimums, no commitments, no "contact sales for pricing." At 50,000 emails per month, that's $5. Not $500. Five dollars.
A custom editor for templates. GrapesJS gives us a drag-and-drop email builder that we own. No vendor lock-in, no "upgrade to unlock this block." Every template is stored as JSON — portable, versionable, ours.
Event-driven automation. Every action in the system emits an event. Form submitted? Event. Email opened? Event. CRM stage changed? Event. Workflows listen for these events and execute steps: send an email, update a contact, hit a webhook, wait three days, check a condition, then branch.
Prepaid credit wallets. Instead of monthly subscriptions, clients buy email credits. $10 gets you 100,000 sends. Auto-recharge when you run low. No surprise invoices, no overages, no "we need to talk about your plan."
What this actually looks like
A client in the home-services space runs their entire email operation through TEGO:
- 3 active workflows — new lead nurture, booking confirmation, monthly newsletter
- ~4,000 contacts — imported from their old CRM via CSV, deduplicated, tagged
- 12 campaigns sent — open rates averaging 38%, click rates at 4.2%
- Total monthly cost: $0.40
That's not a typo. Four hundred emails times $0.10 per thousand.
The tradeoffs
You don't get a Salesforce-grade reporting suite. You don't get 47 integration tiles on a marketplace page. You don't get AI-generated subject lines (yet).
What you get is a system that does the three things that actually move revenue: it sends the right message, to the right person, at the right time. And it doesn't charge you $800/month for the privilege.
When enterprise pricing makes sense
If you have 500,000+ contacts, a team of 10 marketers, and complex multi-touch attribution requirements — yes, go buy HubSpot Enterprise. The tooling is genuinely good at that scale.
But if you're running a real business with a real budget and you need marketing that works, not marketing that impresses your board deck? Build the stack. Own the data. Keep the margin.
That's what we do.