Email newsletter subscriptions

+1 for Buttondown from me as well, but I don’t have that over 1000 subscribers “problem” quite yet, so there’s that :smile:

Beehiv has free plan up to 2500 subscribers, but might be bit overkill. Haven’t tried it myself either, just heard it recommended a few times.

Sendy is something I would personally try if I ever go over that 1000 subscribers limit and decided not to use Buttondown anymore. It has a one-time fee of $69 and it uses Amazon SES for sending emails. The sending of emails itself cost almost nothing, as far as I know, it’s a dollar per 10,000 emails or so.

The caveat with Sendy is, that it’s a self-hosted app, so you need to install it on a server. Digital Ocean would be one hosting option for that. Here’s a guide for that if someone wants to give it a go. Installing and configuring is not rocket science, but there’s some configuring involved surely :slight_smile:

Then there’s MailChimp of course, seems to be about $26.50/month per for 1500 subscibers. But their pricing go up pretty fast from there.

Let us know if you find some great alternative(s) for Buttondown. Would be curious to know myself!

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Ah yeah, I’ve come across Beehiv previously but had forgotten about it. It looks neat, but probably a little overkill for what I’m needing.

Sendy is also great to know about! Previously someone helped me get a self-hosted Discourse set up with DigitalOcean (& Mailgun) so I’m somewhat familiar; so a good option to know about for the future, though that guide scares me a little, haha :upside_down_face:

For now, I’m tempted to see how TinyLetter works (it works up to 5,000 subs) and switch in the future if I need to.

I’ve been unable to find anything similar… I’m a little surprised there aren’t more “simple” providers out there, I really just want to send clean-looking emails (though, I guess, tools have to be monetarily sustainable to be worthwhile – so perhaps a ‘simple’ product wouldn’t be viable for the maker; TinyLetter is Mailchimp-owned, so I guess that’s what makes it worthwhile for them in the long-run). Buttondown would be a contender if I was in the free tier!