ActiveCampaign

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Build the marketing automation I actually need instead of ActiveCampaign.

Be realistic about what people actually use: **most accounts run four automations and a monthly newsletter.** Build those, well, and you have replaced the product for a fraction of the effort — and the pricing here escalates hard with list size, which is why people leave.

STACK
- Node 20+ with Fastify, server-rendered HTML with a little vanilla JS
- SQLite through better-sqlite3, WAL mode
- A worker process
- MJML for templates, a relay for delivery
- Caddy in front

THE DATA MODEL
- contacts: id, email, attrs_json, score, consent_at, source, unsubscribed_at
- events: id, contact_id, name, props_json, at — one table for every behaviour
- automations: id, name, trigger_json, steps_json, is_active, version
- enrolments: id, contact_id, automation_id, version, position, next_at, entered_at, exited_at, exit_reason
- sends, deals, stage_changes as in any CRM, all append-only where they record history

THE AUTOMATION ENGINE
- Steps: wait, send, condition, tag, score, webhook, add to a pipeline. Seven step kinds cover everything anybody builds
- **The enrolment stores the automation version.** Editing an automation while people are inside it otherwise moves them to a step that no longer means the same thing — this is the subtle bug that produces messages nobody can explain
- A lease on the queue, idempotency per contact per step, exit conditions evaluated before every step
- A hard cap on total sends per contact per day across everything
- **A visual run history per contact**: which steps they hit and when. Without it, 'why did she get this email' is unanswerable, and that question is asked weekly

SCORING, WITH A WARNING
- Points for behaviours, decayed over time. Decay matters: a score that only rises makes everybody hot eventually
- **Sales will ignore the score unless they can see what produced it.** Show the contributing events on the contact, or the whole mechanism is decoration
- Validate the score against outcomes: do high scorers actually convert more? If not, the weights are guesses and should be changed or abandoned

THE CRM HALF
- Deals with an append-only stage history, a required lost reason, and a next action on every open deal
- Automations that can create and move deals, and deal changes that can enrol contacts. That two-way link is the reason to have both in one system

COMPLIANCE AND DELIVERABILITY
- Confirmed opt-in recorded, permanent suppression, one-click unsubscribe, plain text alternative
- Stop mailing six months of silence, which is the cheapest deliverability lever there is
- Rent the sending through one small adapter so the provider stays swappable

WHAT MATTERS MOST
Versioned enrolments and a per-contact run history. One keeps the automations correct as they change; the other is the only way anybody can debug them.