Buttondown is a small, elegant tool for producing newsletters | Hacker News Reader

Buttondown is a small, elegant tool for producing newsletters

buttondown.email

78 pointsmemorable21 comments

If anyone looking for an open source alternative, check out listmonk, it’s pretty slick!

listmonk does look awesome but I couldn’t see how you could make newsletters available to read on the web too.

I really like buttondown, but I stopped using it. The main issue was that mail would go into spam more often than other newsletter providers (I checked this against substack, mailchimp, revue, and tinyletter).

Any reason why buttondown in particular would be more affected by this? Or maybe it's just me.

Buttondown uses AWS simple email service, maybe it’s that

In my experience Revue is the worst in deliverability

I just started using this service. My partner and I just had a baby and we wanted a way to share periodic updates with friends and family that was not dependent on social media. The simplicity of the service is a real breath of fresh air and everything seems to "just work". Recipients seem to appreciate it as well (one called it "classy").

Buttondown seems like a complete departure from the typical growth-hacked, venture-backed, over-engineered "products" in the SAAS space and I'm here for it.

Big fan of Buttondown as a recipient of the newsletters. Seems to work just right. Also a big fan of Justin, the author.

Heartily recommend it! We've been using it for a while and it's been great.

The support is great too.

I’m a big fan of Justin’s work on Buttondown (though, as a newsletter creator, I tend to roll my own on things). He’s created a really unique service that a lot of folks who are sick of the Substack/Revue approach will find benefit in.

Buttondown is wonderful. I now use the newsletter service that is bundled with Ghost managed hosting, but I have fond memories of Buttondown. The quick, actually human customer support is a particular boon.

Yikes. This is a brave position to put yourself in; kudos. Is it tough to deal with deliverability, esp w/o control over what clients send out...?

(I run Buttondown.)

It is certainly trickier than I expected at the onset of starting the project (which is true of pretty much everything related to the email space), but not overly onerous. Most of my risk lies less in content and more in recipient, and I pour most of my efforts into subscriber validation during onboarding & activation.

Curious: I write a newletter to 50 friends and send through mailgun. Apple seems to be the most strict for delivery. If I write the word payment (I wrote a fiction essay with the word payment) I'll get soft blocked.

Does that track with your experience?

I think it'd be a really cool blog post if you had the time to just share what you see.

Looks like their AI spam filter is pretty sophisticated

Too bad they don't have native RSS integration, looking for something to replace Mailerlite.

Agreed: this is probably the one feature I'm currently most embarrassed of not having, FWIW! (You can accomplish it with Zapier at the moment, but I'm tired of having to give that as a halfway answer.)

Yeah, I saw that. Thanks. But I don't want to move from a unified system to having two points of configuration/change/breach/failure.

How does this compare to TinyLetter? (Been using them for years, no complaints)

https://buttondown.email/comparisons/tinyletter

I've used both. They're fairly similar (at least for my very basic needs), but Buttondown isn't owned by Intuit, which is a win in my book.

What’s wrong with Intuit? Do they have some bad reputation

https://www.propublica.org/article/inside-turbotax-20-year-f...

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