I was paying around $250/month for email services I barely used.
Kit for one product. Mailchimp for another. Separate accounts for Gratu, tini.bio, mx.works, ClawDeck, andresmax.com. Five products, four paid plans, four logins. And I was using maybe 5% of what any of them offered. No drip campaigns. No automations. No landing pages. Just subscriber storage.
So I built my own.
nod.so
nod.so is a subscriber management tool I built in 48 hours using Claude Code. It’s a Rails 8 app running on Render with Resend for transactional emails. It currently manages over 2,770 subscribers across 7 lists, all from a single dashboard.
Here’s what it does:
- One dashboard for every subscriber across every product
- REST API so any app can push and pull subscriber data
- MCP integration for querying subscribers with AI agents
- Public embeddable signup forms
- CSV imports from Mailchimp and Kit
- Broadcast emails for newsletters and updates
- Weekly summary emails with growth stats
- Unsubscribe flows and subscriber status management
Nothing fancy. Just everything I actually need.
How it all connects
All of my apps now POST signups directly to nod.so. Hugo sites use a form endpoint. The iOS app hits the API. The Rails apps use a simple service object. One system, one source of truth.
The MCP integration is my favorite part. I can ask my AI agent things like “how many subscribers did Gratu add this week?” and get an answer without opening a dashboard. It turns subscriber data into something I can just talk to.
The math
Before: ~$250/month across 4 paid accounts. After: ~$20/month on Render.
That’s roughly $2,760 saved per year. For a tool I built in a weekend and actually prefer using.
Why this matters
This is the kind of thing that used to require a team and months of work. Now, with Claude Code and modern Rails, you can build production-grade internal tools in a weekend. Not prototypes. Real tools that handle real data and replace real expenses.
If you’re running multiple products and paying for email tools you barely use, this might be worth considering. I’m planning to open nod.so up to other founders who are in the same spot.
If that sounds interesting, join the waitlist. And if you’re curious about how we build tools like this, check out how we built this site or our philosophy on just building the thing.