MailerLite

Ignas Rubežius founded MailerLite in Vilnius, Lithuania in 2010 as a simple, affordable email marketing tool for small businesses and bloggers. While Mailchimp dominated the market with a generous free tier, MailerLite undercut on price at every paid tier while offering cleaner UX and better deliverability. The team was fully remote from the beginning. Growth came entirely from SEO and comparison content — ranking for "Mailchimp alternative," "cheapest email marketing" — and from the bootstrapped SaaS community, where MailerLite was frequently cited as the most underrated tool in the stack. The free plan was genuinely useful (1,000 subscribers, 12,000 emails per month), driving massive top-of-funnel. By 2022 MailerLite had 1.2M customers and $12M in revenue. In 2022 the Polish company Vercom acquired MailerLite for $90M — one of the largest bootstrapped SaaS exits in Europe. Ignas and the team had built a $90M business from Lithuania with zero outside funding over 12 years, serving over a million businesses.