Mautic Development & Managed Services

Mautic Development That Runs — And Keeps Running After We Build It

The entire model of SaaS marketing automation is a per-contact tax on your own audience. You pay every month, the vendor owns the platform, and if you cancel you leave with a CSV export and nothing else. Mautic — the leading open-source marketing automation platform — breaks that model: you own the code, you own the database, and your contacts do not inflate somebody's invoice. The gap most organizations hit is between "we deployed Mautic" and "we are running marketing automation that works," because Mautic rewards teams who run it as a monitored operation rather than install it and walk away. We know the shape of that operation precisely, because we published ours.

We open-sourced the Mautic deployment we run ourselves

In 2021 Facet released its production-tested Mautic Kubernetes distribution — Helm 3 charts, high-availability manifests, and the operational tooling we had built for our own Mautic environments — as an open-source repository anyone can read. It is still there. You can open it before you talk to us, and you can check whether the people selling you a managed Mautic service have ever had to make one survive a failover.

That is an unusual thing for an agency to have done, and it is the whole claim on this page. Most firms selling Mautic work have configured campaigns inside somebody else's hosting. We wrote the deployment layer, gave it away, and then had to operate it — which is where the second half of the argument comes from.

The monitoring exists because we needed it. Deliverability drift, dead cron queues, a CRM sync that stops passing records without erroring — we hit each of those on infrastructure we were responsible for before we offered to watch anyone else's.
Agents carry the watching; people carry the calls. Our own engineering, quality review and reporting run through agent loops under human command, and we wrote those loops up the same way we open-sourced the deployment — what each one runs, where they broke, and what a person still holds. Applied here, that means the continuous checks run constantly and a named engineer owns every change that touches a live sending domain.
It changes what the retainer buys. The expensive part of managed marketing automation has always been somebody manually opening dashboards to confirm nothing broke. When that pass is carried by agents, the hours you are paying for go to segmentation strategy, campaign architecture and deliverability recovery instead of to checking.
We will tell you when the answer is not Mautic. We also implement and run HubSpot, so we have no structural reason to push you onto open source. The HubSpot services page argues the other side of this honestly.

The SaaS marketing automation tax — and what open-source Mautic changes

SaaS marketing automation platforms charge by contact count. That makes the platform most expensive exactly when your marketing is working, and it makes switching harder every month, because your segmentation logic, template library and campaign history live in a database somebody else controls.

Mautic inverts the arrangement. You deploy once to infrastructure you control and the per-contact cost is effectively zero. The investment moves to configuration, operations and the expertise to keep the platform performing — which is work you can buy, stop buying, or take in-house, unlike a licence.

Our owned position: SaaS marketing automation taxes you per contact forever — you are renting your own audience. Open-source Mautic means you own the platform and the data, and we run it as a loop so "you own it" does not quietly become "you're on your own."

What Mautic delivers at enterprise scale

Mautic is not a stripped-down alternative. It is a full marketing automation platform:

Contact management and segmentation — behavioral filters, list hygiene, dynamic segments that update on contact activity
Multi-channel campaign orchestration — email, SMS, social and web push, landing pages, forms
Lead scoring and lifecycle stages — configurable scoring rules tied to activity, CRM stage mapping
Drip and workflow automation — visual campaign builder with conditional branching, time and event triggers
CRM integrations — native connectors and API-level integration with Salesforce, HubSpot, SugarCRM, Zoho and custom platforms
Analytics and reporting — campaign performance, contact activity timelines, attribution reporting

The platform scales to millions of contacts on well-architected infrastructure. The ceiling is your hosting environment rather than a pricing tier.

What the loop actually does

Once your instance is live it enters a managed loop. These four passes are carried by agents for an unromantic reason: each one is continuous, mechanically checkable, and almost always fine — which is precisely the kind of work a person stops doing carefully around week six.

Watch the sending reputation, not the send. Domain reputation, bounce and complaint rates, blocklist status and authentication records are checked continuously against thresholds, so a drift is a signal this week instead of a discovery after a campaign lands in spam. Deliverability is not a configuration you set once; it decays quietly and it decays in the one place you cannot see from inside the platform.
Compare every campaign against its own baseline. Opens, clicks and conversions are read against what that segment did last time rather than against an industry average, so an underperforming subject line or a segment that has gone cold surfaces with the data attached instead of waiting for a monthly report somebody has to request.
Stage and test every platform update before it lands. Mautic ships security patches and releases on its own cadence, and the work of pulling them, running them against a staging instance and checking queue, cron and database health is high-frequency and pass-fail — the definition of work worth automating and a genuine chore to do by hand.
Prove the integrations are still passing records. CRM syncs, form submissions and webhook pipelines are exercised and reconciled, because a sync that silently stops is the most expensive failure in this stack: nothing errors, nothing alerts, and sales simply stops receiving leads for a month.

What a person still decides

The loop above is throughput. None of it is judgment, and a managed-services vendor who blurs that line is overselling the machinery.

When to take a major version. A Mautic major upgrade against custom plugins is a risk decision with a business calendar attached to it. The loop tells you the upgrade exists and what it touches; a person decides whether it happens before or after your Q4 campaign.
What the sending infrastructure is worth. Dedicated IP or shared, how slowly to warm, whether to split transactional from marketing sending — these are trade-offs between speed and reputation, and the honest answer depends on how much a burned domain would cost you specifically.
What the segmentation model means. An agent applies the rule. Only you can say what "engaged" means for your business, and every score, branch and suppression list inherits that definition.
What gets migrated and what gets left behind. A migration is an opportunity to abandon the segments nobody has used since 2023. Deciding which history is worth carrying is a business call, not a data-transfer one.
Every destructive change. Property deletions, list merges, campaign retirement and anything touching a live send go through a named person with a documented rollback.

Run the platform economics on your own numbers

The figures below are illustrative — they exist to show the shape of the decision, not to quote you. Put your own contact count and your own current invoice in and the structure holds.

Action item: take your current monthly platform invoice, multiply it by thirty-six, and add the increase you would expect from your own list-growth plan over those three years. Then compare that total against implementation plus three years of operating a platform you own at the end of it. Whichever way that arithmetic falls for you is the honest answer, and it does not fall the same way for every business — a small list on a platform your team already likes rarely justifies a migration, and we will say so.

How could AI agents run your marketing automation platform? Book the 45-minute Mautic ownership review. Bring your current contact count, your current invoice and one campaign you think is underperforming. You leave with a ranked list of the operational passes an agent loop could take over, an illustrative three-year cost comparison built on your own numbers, and a written recommendation — including "your list is too small and your team is happy where they are; migrating would cost you more than the licence does" when that is what the arithmetic says.

What a Mautic engagement includes

Platform architecture and implementation

Every engagement opens with discovery across your contact data model, existing stack, integration requirements and sending environment, before a line of configuration is written. We do not install Mautic and hand you a login.

Infrastructure provisioning and deployment — cloud-hosted, self-managed, or on the Kubernetes distribution linked above
Custom plugin and integration development where a native connector does not exist
Contact migration from HubSpot, Marketo, Pardot, Mailchimp and ActiveCampaign, preserving segment history and opt-in records
Sending infrastructure — dedicated IPs, SPF/DKIM/DMARC, warm-up sequencing, reputation monitoring
Campaign architecture — drip sequences, behavioral triggers, scoring rules, lifecycle mapping
Landing pages and forms with conversion tracking
Training and documentation for your marketing team

The configuration, custom plugins and any code we write belong to you — documented, version-controlled and portable. We do not architect dependency that forces you back to us for routine work.

Ongoing managed operations

The loop described above, run on a defined cadence, with a named engineer who owns the environment and a deliverability posture report you receive rather than request.

Open-source depth, not open-source familiarity

Facet has built and run open-source platforms since 2014 — Drupal, WordPress, Laravel, and open-source CRM and marketing automation environments across professional services, healthcare, law, property management and B2B wholesale. CIOReview named us a Top 10 Digital Transformation Services Company in 2021. Our team of 40 across 9 timezones and 6 continents means your sending infrastructure has coverage when your team is offline, and our 500+ specialist network means we staff deliverability expertise to the engagement rather than to whoever is free.

If we audit your instance and find debt — a contact database whose hygiene will destroy deliverability, a sending domain with no warm-up history, a segmentation model that will not survive migration — you hear it before we touch anything, with a prioritized remediation list rather than a change order six weeks in.

Where Mautic work goes next

Mautic is one delivery surface of the same operating model, not a separate business. Most clients stop here, and that is a complete relationship.

Marketing automation — the platform-agnostic version of this argument, if you have not settled which platform you are running.
AI Managed Services — the run layer. A named Facet team keeps the loops earning as your offers, segments and goals move.
Agentic Engineering — the build layer, for the work that does not fit inside a marketing platform: custom integrations, internal tooling, anything where Mautic runs out of room.
Agentic Operating System — the same pattern installed across every operating area rather than one function.

Own the platform, and own the exit

Every other decision in this category is reversible only by export. That is the quiet term in a SaaS contract: you can leave, but you leave the logic behind, so each month of good work makes the next platform conversation more expensive. Mautic is the one arrangement where the cost of leaving does not grow — the database is yours, the code is yours, the deployment tooling is public, and a competent engineer can pick it up from the documentation we hand over.

That includes leaving us. The only lock-in we could build here is our own, and the repository at the top of this page is the reason we have not: the deployment we run is the deployment you can read. What you are buying is an operation, and an operation you can end is the only kind worth paying for.

How could AI agents run your marketing automation platform? Book the 45-minute Mautic ownership review — no deck, no pricing conversation. You leave with the ranked list of operational passes an agent loop could absorb, an illustrative three-year comparison built on your own contact count and invoice, and a written recommendation you keep and can act on with anyone, including your current vendor. If the honest read is that you should stay on the platform you have and spend the difference on the program instead, that is what the document will say.

FAQ

How much does Mautic development cost?

Scoped implementations typically start in the $6,000–$20,000 range (illustrative; it varies with contact volume, integration complexity and migration scope). Migrations from SaaS platforms are scoped separately after reviewing your existing architecture, contact database state and integrations. Ongoing managed operations are priced monthly. We give a firm number after a discovery call rather than a range before one.

Is Mautic really comparable to HubSpot or Pardot?

For core functions — email campaigns, drip sequences, lead scoring, behavioral segmentation, CRM integration and landing pages — genuinely yes. It lacks some of the polished reporting depth of the enterprise platforms and its third-party plugin ecosystem is smaller. The structural difference is ownership: the capability arrives without a per-contact subscription and can be extended by any developer with PHP and API skills. Which platform is right depends on your team's technical capacity, your list economics and your data-ownership requirements, and we run both — see HubSpot services for the case on the other side.

Can Facet migrate our existing platform to Mautic?

Yes. Migrations from HubSpot, Pardot, Marketo, Mailchimp and ActiveCampaign are a regular part of this practice, covering contact data and opt-in records, segment definitions, templates, campaign logic reconstruction and sending infrastructure. The part that needs the most care is deliverability: a new sending domain and IP have to be warmed gradually, and a rushed migration does real reputational damage. The warm-up plan is built before a single contact record moves.

What happens to our data if we stop working with Facet?

You keep all of it. Mautic runs on infrastructure you control — your cloud account or a hosting arrangement in your name. You can export the full contact database, campaign history and configuration at any point, and if you want to take the platform in-house or move to another partner you leave with everything, including the documentation. There is no vendor to notify and no export quota.

Do we need Kubernetes to run Mautic?

No. The Kubernetes distribution is what we built for environments that need high availability and horizontal scale, and we open-sourced it. Plenty of instances run perfectly well on a single well-configured server, and recommending the simpler deployment when it fits is part of the job — the complexity should match the sending volume and the uptime requirement, not the architecture diagram.