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Posted by oahmadov 3 days ago

Show HN: I built an open-source email builder, alternative to Beefree/Unlayer(play.templatical.com)
159 points | 48 commentspage 3
eptityri 3 days ago|
This is really nice, thanks for building. I will use that heavily :)
oahmadov 3 days ago|
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pratyaksh10 3 days ago||
does it store our data persistently on your server/system
oahmadov 3 days ago|
No — and this is actually one of the real architectural differences from the closed-source competitors like Beefree and Unlayer.

The SDK is fully client-side — it runs in your app, the JSON templates go wherever you decide to store them (your DB, S3, anything). Nothing touches my infrastructure. SDK also has zero telemetry.

The Cloud tier on the roadmap (AI rewrite, real-time collab, MCP, saved modules, media library, comments) is opt-in — you only hit it if you actively sign up.

aeagentic 3 days ago||
Looks like a grapes fork?
oahmadov 3 days ago|
No — built from scratch on Vue 3 + TipTap. Different data model entirely: Templatical stores templates as a typed JSON tree of blocks and renders them as MJML; GrapesJS is a generic HTML/CSS page-builder retrofitted for email via an MJML plugin.
aeagentic 3 days ago||
Thanks for the response, I will have a closer look! Maybe it's just the current UI Trends that look similar to me. Do you like grapes in general?
oahmadov 3 days ago||
Yeah, I get what you mean about UI. But honestly that similarity is also a selling point — people are used to how visual editors look and work. Shipping a drastically different UI is a hard sell.

GrapesJS — the OG embeddable visual builder. Yes, I like it. I haven't used it recently, but I built production landing-page builders on top of it a while back.

I saw they also have an email builder now and checked it just now. Looks and works fine, but you can tell it's a retrofitted approach from a landing-page builder. With Templatical I wanted to build something from the ground up, email-only.

trulayer 2 days ago||
did you build it yourself or by AI?
oahmadov 1 day ago|
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galaSerge 1 day ago||
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oahmadov 3 days ago||
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brianjlogan 3 days ago||
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mehmetkeremmtl 3 days ago|
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