EmailOctopus
👤 Jonathan & Gareth Bull (Jonathan, a software engineer, wrote an email script at about 14; he and marketer Gareth built this as a side hustle.)🌐 sitejonathanbull.co.uk𝕏LinkedIn
A bootstrapped side project became a $3M/yr email tool by wrapping Amazon SES — cheapest, simplest option.
Will it work? · our read
Cheapest wins. Bootstrapped a crowded market by being cheaper — a thin UI on AWS SES. The trick is copyable, so the real moat became the free-tier funnel and years of SEO, not the code.
01How the money moves
Free tier: 2,500 subs, 10k emails/mo, no card
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List outgrows the free cap
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Upgrade to paid from $9/mo billed yearly — AWS SES sending stays tiny
02The numbers
$3M+StatedARR · founder-stated 2023
2023-07
Grew from about $1.2M to $3M+ ARR in roughly 18 months, fully bootstrapped. EmailOctopus blog
Over $3M ARR (July 2023), up from about $1.2M eighteen months earlier — bootstrapped, zero outside funding.
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You have the verdict. Members get the work behind it.
- The CENTS scorecard — where it's strong, where it's soft
- The founder's key move, and the counter-move
- How it could die — the evidence, and how sure we are
- The case against our own call
- A 🚀 launchpad prompt — the case, as a plan for your business
We rate our own confidence — and argue against ourselves. Nobody else in this category does.
Sources always public on all 560 cases · cancel anytime · 14-day refund
See a full teardown, free → ImportYetiSourcesSources last checked 25 August 2026
Indie Bites #99 (Nov 2023) — Jonathan Bull & Tom Evans state $3M+ ARREmailOctopus blog — 'over $3M ARR' (July 2023, first-party)AWS guest post — how EmailOctopus is built on Amazon SESIndie Hackers #42 — bootstrapping in a crowded marketLatka — team size and revenue tracking (lower estimate)
Revenue is first-party: the founders state 'over $3M ARR' on Indie Bites #99 (Nov 2023) and in EmailOctopus's own July 2023 blog post — marked STATED/verified. The about $1.2M figure from 18 months prior is founder-stated too. Latka lists a lower number (about $1.2M, 2025), likely stale or partial; I trust the first-party $3M+ for 2023 over it. The 120k+ figure is signups, not paying customers. Jonathan's teenage email script (about age 14) was for an earlier, unrelated project — not EmailOctopus, which he and Gareth built years later as a nights-and-weekends side hustle before founding it in 2014 [our read on chronology]. Drama is documented: they launched free and lost nearly all users when they introduced pricing (Indie Bites), then rebuilt on price positioning. The 'dies' scenario is my structural read [our read], not a prediction — they have thrived for a decade. We never score you.