White-Label Email Marketing: Run Email Under Your Own Brand

Agencies ask me two versions of the same question. "Can I sell email marketing to my clients under my own name?" and "Which platform lets me do that without the margins disappearing?" I have been building email software since 1999, and Octeth was built from the start to run many client accounts under someone else's brand. This page explains how white-label email marketing works, compares the options with prices checked on 2026-10-03, and shows where Octeth fits and where it does not.

Short answer

If you want to	Look at
Run your own branded email platform on your servers, with no per-client fees	Octeth, MailWizz (Extended), Acelle Mail (Extended)
A hosted platform you resell without running servers	BigMailer, Simvoly, Transpond, Mailmunch
Resell a well-known SaaS at a discount, branded lightly	ActiveCampaign agency program
Client portal, CRM and email in one hosted bundle	SuiteDash, Vendasta
Only branded sending (domains, IPs) under your own app	Mailgun, UniOne, or Octeth's delivery service
The cheapest way to send newsletters for a handful of clients on Amazon SES	Sendy

What is white-label email marketing?

White-label email marketing is email marketing software or service that an agency or reseller offers to its clients under its own brand. The clients log in to a platform with the agency's name, logo and domain, the agency sets the prices and bills them, and the company that built the software stays invisible. It differs from a referral program, where the client still holds an account with the original vendor.

The three ways to offer it

1. Reseller SaaS. A hosted platform gives you a branded dashboard and sub-accounts for clients. You run no servers. You pay the vendor per contact, per client or a monthly tier, and that cost grows with every client you add. The vendor's sending infrastructure and acceptable use policy apply to all your clients.
2. Self-hosted license. You install the platform on your own server and rebrand all of it. The license is a one-time or yearly fee that does not grow per client. You choose the sending infrastructure, set the policies, and own the data. You also own the operations: updates, servers and deliverability.
3. Sending API. Services like Mailgun and UniOne brand the sending layer (your domains, tracking links, dedicated IPs) but give your clients no marketing interface. This fits software companies that build their own email features.

White-label options compared

Prices from each vendor's own pages, checked on 2026-10-03.

How white-label works in Octeth

Octeth is a multi-tenant platform: one installation serves many client accounts. White-labeling happens at three levels.

1. Your platform brand. Run Octeth on your own domain with your own SSL certificate. Replace the product name "Octeth" with yours, upload your logo, and set the theme colors and CSS. Every screen, system email and login page shows your brand.
2. Client groups. Each user group can carry its own theme, with its own product name, logo and colors, so you can run several brands, or a premium tier with its own look, on one installation. Groups also set sending limits, permissions and the delivery server each client uses.
3. Client accounts. Each client gets its own login, lists, segments, templates, journeys, sender domains and reports. Clients never see each other or the platform underneath.

For billing you have two choices. Keep invoicing clients through your own system, and use Octeth's account usage API to meter what each account sends. Or turn on the built-in subscription billing in the new interface: plan catalog, card payments through Stripe or accept.blue, invoices, dunning, and automatic moves between plans. Provisioning is scriptable through the API, so a new client can be created from your own signup flow.

What your clients' recipients still see

Most white-label guides stop at the logo. Rebranding the interface changes what your users see. It does not change what their recipients see, and a mail administrator who opens the message source will find the platform's fingerprints unless you configure them separately:

1. The X-Mailer header on every message.
2. X-Complaints-To and X-Report-Abuse headers, which tell receivers where to send complaints.
3. utm_source and utm_medium on tracked links.
4. The envelope sender, Message-ID domain, List-Unsubscribe link and tracking domain, which appear in headers and in the browser address bar after a click.

In Octeth each of these is configurable, and our white-label deployment checklist walks through them one by one. On a reseller SaaS, check which of them you control before you put your name on the service.

Deliverability: the shared reputation problem

When all your clients send through the same IPs and the same shared domain, they share one reputation. One client with a purchased list can push every other client into the spam folder. On most reseller SaaS platforms you cannot change this, because the sending infrastructure belongs to the vendor.

The fix is isolation. In Octeth, delivery servers are assigned per client group and per channel (marketing, transactional, autoresponder), so a high-risk client can send through its own relay account or its own IPs while everyone else stays clean. Each client authenticates its own sender domains with SPF, DKIM and DMARC. Our free SPF generator, DKIM generator and DMARC generator produce the records, and the IP warm-up planner schedules new IPs. If you would rather not run the sending side, we operate delivery for customers on dedicated IPs with managed warm-up, bounce and feedback-loop processing, and blocklist monitoring.

The economics: per-contact pricing vs a license

Reseller SaaS pricing is easy to start with and expensive to grow. At $12 per 5,000 contacts a month (BigMailer's Agency Pro rate above 200,000 contacts), 1 million contacts across your clients costs $2,400 a month, or $28,800 a year, and every new client adds to it. A self-hosted license costs the same whether you run 10 clients or 50. Your recurring costs become servers and sending, for example $0.10 to $0.16 per 1,000 emails on Amazon SES. Our cost comparison puts numbers on common SaaS platforms.

The trade is responsibility. With a license you run, or pay someone to run, the servers, updates and deliverability. That is why we install Octeth with our customers and offer support and managed delivery.

Ten things to check before you choose

1. Can every client use its own domain, for the platform and for sending?
2. Is the vendor's brand removed everywhere: interface, system emails, help links, and message headers?
3. Can you isolate a client's sending from the rest?
4. Who owns the subscriber data, and can you export all of it?
5. Who bills the client, and can you set your own prices?
6. Can you provision clients through an API?
7. What happens if the vendor decides one of your clients breaks its policy?
8. Who supports your clients, and who supports you?
9. Does the price grow per contact, per client, or not at all?
10. How hard is it to leave?

Where Octeth fits

Octeth is built for agencies managing email for 10 or more clients, and for high-volume senders who want their own platform. You get:

1. A fully white-labeled, multi-tenant platform on your own domain, with per-group branding.
2. Client accounts with their own lists, segments, journeys, sender domains and reports.
3. Per-client delivery routing across Amazon SES, Mailgun, SendGrid, PowerMTA or any SMTP server.
4. Billing your way: your own invoicing with usage metering, or the built-in billing.
5. A full API and webhooks for provisioning and integration.
6. Installation, onboarding and support from the team that builds it. A full multi-client setup takes two to four weeks.

It has been in production since 1999, with 20,000+ installations in 138 countries. If you manage email for fewer than five clients, a reseller SaaS will be simpler and cheaper. The free Community License does not include white-labeling, but it is a good way to evaluate the platform. For a wider view of self-hosted platforms, see our self-hosted email marketing software comparison.

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