Hi HN,

I’ve been building MailUI, a lightweight HTML email builder that includes:

a modern drag-and-drop email editor

an embeddable plugin that can be added to any SaaS app with a single script

a large template gallery

an AI text-to-email generator

The goal is to make email creation easier for both individual users and developers. Tools like Unlayer and Stripo are powerful, but many people find them heavy, slow to integrate, or difficult to customize. I wanted something cleaner, more modern, and easier to embed.

Why I built this

I run a small product and needed a solid email builder, but everything available was either too enterprise-focused, too hard to integrate, or too inflexible. Building a custom editor from scratch is a huge project—blocks, templates, drag-and-drop behavior, HTML rendering, responsive handling, export formats, etc. MailUI started as an internal tool to solve that gap and eventually grew into something I wanted to release publicly.

How the embeddable plugin works

The plugin loads with a single script tag. It renders a full email editor inside your app and communicates with your backend using a small API layer. You can customize colors, fonts, allowed components, templates, and export formats (HTML or JSON). It’s framework-agnostic and works with React, Vue, Next.js, Laravel, Rails, and others.

Technical notes

The editor runs as a standalone client bundle

The template system uses JSON-based blocks

AI generation is handled by an internal API wrapper around OpenAI

What’s next

Custom block SDK

Collaboration features

More templates

Improved plugin API

I’d appreciate any feedback.

Thanks for reading.