Notes on Buttondown.com | Hacker News Reader

Notes on Buttondown.com

jmduke.com

126 pointsluu89 comments

I just signed up for Buttondown after researching and comparing a dozen other newsletter platforms.

I told our CEO that Buttondown is exactly the kind of scrappy startup we'd want representing our own startup.

If it's helpful for the HackerNews community, I've made my comparison spreadsheet free to view: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1P9FyAYDdFZvTzmXVQi8A...

(I'm not an employee and have no financial incentive, I'm just a fan.)

Thanks for sharing. I love it. It's funny to see Mailchimp right at the bottom. Is Mailchimp becoming the "GoDaddy" of email.

I remember Mailchimp from their very beginnings. Things naturally evolve and somewhere on the road they lost their mojo.

But picked up about 12B. Mojo. 12B. Mojo. 12B. 12B.

It's clearly not objective, or at least not well explained, MailChip appears to be given a "pricing score" lower than most others that are listed with a higher price.

Good catch, thanks. According to the pricing page, Mailchimp starts out around the same as the others, but as soon as you go over 500 contacts, the price jumps from "Standard" $20/month to "Premium" $350/month. I'll add that as a note to the Drawbacks field.

I think you may have misunderstood the MailChimp pricing page, it has "Standard" plans all the way up to 100,000 contacts.

It's certainly not cheap at that scale, but the 10k package for $135 is comparable to Buttondown.

Thanks for responding. I only gave Mailchimp a brief glance, admittedly they're no longer a favorite for me, and the pricing page was confusing, but I also don't want to spread misinformation. I'll update again.

I'm in at the start of a similar process of evaluation.

I've just stumbled on keila.io - open source, bring your own email provider, nice enough block editor, they can host or self-hosted (still don't understand the business model, but hey ho)

Any other open source newsletter platforms not on 4ar0n's list?

Edit: forgot hosted or self-host

Creator of Keila here. If you have any questions, I’d be happy to answer them!

Whoa, nice! You just resolved my primary concern about using Open Source projects, which is relying on "Community Support".

Adding Keila.io to my spreadsheet.

Ghost is oddly missing

I'd never heard of Ghost.org, but looking at their website, they appear to be much more than just a free newsletter platform. It's not what I'm looking for, but it does look pretty cool for somebody that needs a professional publishing stack. They show their competitors as Medium, WordPress, Substack, and Patreon, and if I were considering any of those I'd give Ghost a closer look.

ConvertKit supports 10,000 subscribers on a free plan.

https://convertkit.com/pricing

Fixed, good catch, thanks! I started my research using other people's spreadsheets rather than checking every vendor's pricing. Must have had old data.

Cool spreadsheet. Another one to add to the list is Audienceful, my favorite writing experience by far of any email tool.

Seems like we have similar taste, I’ve been pretty turned off by all the growth-hacky, get-rich-quick vibes of a lot of the “creator” platforms like beehive and convertkit. Any platform trying to opt me into 5 other newsletters after signing up is a spam machine in my book.

Why isn't SendGrid on the list? It seems to have a similar pricing level

Not to guess why it was not included, but speaking as someone from the infosec realm, it has a reputation for spam and phishing.

Honestly, I never intended to share this, I was just doing research for ourselves, but here we are. I'm sure there are others I've also left off, but ignoring Twilio's SendGrid feels like an oversight, I'll add them now.

> people stop referring to Buttondown as "Buttondown Email", a personal pet peeve of mine

This is funny because I only remember Buttondown Email because I love the name and domain. I am either going to keep remembering it as Buttondown Email or eventually forget it as Generic Noun Unrelated To Product 9000

Honestly, as long as you don't call it "Buttdown"... (this happens more than you'd think.)

I would recommend setting up a 301 redirect for www (also recommend having this support both http and https)

That’s actually not too bad of a name for the service — like “sit your butt down and read this email”

Author here! Happy to answer any questions folks have.

(I would also be remiss if I didn't say that I am grateful to HN for introducing me to what was called microISVs a decade ago, "indie hacking" five years ago, and now I suppose is mostly called "building in public" / "lifestyle businesses". I was inspired to start Buttondown in no small part due to reading about Candy Japan, Appointment Reminder, et al, and learning that there was a different yet equally valid path for growing a SaaS)

Why was getting the expensive buttondown.com necessary and important? I might have missed that in the post.

Definitely not _necessary_ — I was more or less resigned to not having the domain, since the sticker price was $170K and my mental "is this _really_ worth it?" number was high five figures.

As for why important: a melange of reasons. I had heard a _lot_ from customers and prospects that they couldn't find the site because they searched for/navigated to buttondown.com; I was faintly worried about SEO/brand impact from using a vanity TLD like `.email`; I was faintly worried about a more well-financed competitor buying it and redirecting to their own property; there are a very real number of legacy pieces of software that do not _accept_ `buttondown.email` as a valid domain, which is important when you're dealing with UGC.

(When I was debating what a reasonable purchase price might be, the framing that helped me make a decision was: "if this helps my overall conversion funnel grow by 2% in perpetuity, is it worth it?", and that answer was yes. Time will tell, of course, to see where that number actually lands!)

Could you have structured the deal in a more cash favorable way seeing as you are paying for it from cash flow? That way it would have been less of an immediate impact on finances. For purchases like this, a revolving line of credit is helpful, even tho there's cost to that, because it lessens the impact on cash flow.

Yup, absolutely — you see a lot of the larger brokers do some genre of lease-to-own program (pay us the purchase price plus a near-usurious APY over 24mos and at the end, you can keep the domain.)

My margins are solid and there aren't a lot of competing opportunities to deploy capital besides pulling forward cloud costs or hiring folks (which is a very different value prop altogether), so reasoning about the lump sum was pretty easy, but you're definitely right in that objectively speaking I should have just gotten a line of credit and amortized it that way.

Thanks for sharing your insights and experiences! I am a fan of bootstrapped SaaS, just keep it going as much as you can and avoid the temptation to sell early, although I am sure that opportunity will present itself.

Maybe a bit of a stupid question, but wouldn't it have been enough to just buy the domain and then configure a redirect to the old domain?

Not if you want to build SEO authority on the new domain

Just FYI, you’re still using buttondown.email in your HN profile.

And my old blog domain to boot! Exactly what I meant by "The hardest part of the process was the stuff you can't grep for..."

(T/Y — fixed.)

FYI the “customer support” link in the footer on the homepage also links to support@buttondown.email.

The linked article mentioned that they hadn't moved email over.

How did you handle that users with saved credentials on password managers for.email now didn't get the autofill feature when redirected to .com?

Congrats! Huge get :)

> We ended up using hurl as a test harness around HAProxy, something we probably should have done three years ago.

As maintainer of Hurl [1], this makes me happy!

[1]: https://hurl.dev

As a happy user of Hurl, thank you!

So, switching the domain to buttondown.com brought an uptick of traffic quickly.

People apparently still hear a word, type it, and press Ctrl+Enter, or a mobile equivalent.

Whoever has been parking the domain likely had made a wise investment, and now received $85k for it. Not millions, but still a new car.

> So, switching the domain to buttondown.com brought an uptick of traffic quickly.

Where did you get that from? The blog post says no such thing.

It does:

> I went in expecting SEO traffic to be hit as Google renegotiates legions of canonical URLs; it hasn't, at least thus far. Instead, everything seems to have just bumped fairly healthily.

(emphasis is theirs)

Ah, I interpreted that as the traffic moving over, but it could indeed mean an increase in traffic.

You don't want upticks in traffic, you want upticks in conversions.

People probably go to buttondown thinking they can get a shirt.

If Buttondown.email ever wanted to sell merch, a Buttondown button-down shirt is perfect

For context, Buttondown is like Mailchimp but stripped down to only the essentials. It is simple, has everything I need, but not 1 million things I don't need. I love it.

A minor point to feed back: for me, https://www.buttondown.com/ fails to load, while https://buttondown.com/ works.

Good call and I agree, I personally don't like using the www subdomain but I would definitely redirect it to the main one, especially on important money-making domains!

There is a lot of discussion about it online, like [0]. But whatever arguments there are, there is a whole generation that thinks that urls should start with www.

[0] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/486621/when-should-one-u...

The generation that thinks that remembers when WWW was a new service next to stuff like SMTP and FTP and NNTP. Why wouldn't you put www to distinguish it? It's the new crowd that forgot or never knew about all the other stuff going on behind a domain and wants to hide away all the useful signals.

I was more talking about people that just start typing www when entering a URL. I see it a lot, perhaps more in older people indeed, but certainly mostly in non-techies. Recently I set up some websites for pensionados with a startup, they found it weird their website didn't start with www and asked me to add it.

Edit: If I ddg for NewYork Times, first hit is "https://www.nytimes.com", and https://nytimes.com redirects to that URL.

I came here to say this. Yes I know https://no-www.org/ is a thing, but browsers have a ctrl+enter shortcut that'll top and tail the domain with https://www. and .com - having that go to an error page is not great particularly given the reason to do it was partially ease of access by customers.

I opened the page and still have no clue that buttondown is...

i believe it's some kind of Substack but yeah, some context missing

Mailing list manager. Like MailChimp but it doesn't suck. I use it, and it does everything I want (handle subscribers; send emails written in Markdown) and a lot more. I've interacted with the owner / developer a couple of times and they are a great person.

See https://buttondown.com/ for more.

I'm sorry but even main page is lacking, first sentence:

> Email platforms have been in a weird place lately. Platforms grow and stop supporting you. Or they’ll shut down, despite the fact that you need your email to work like it’s a utility that you can depend on. Or they’ll hike their fees, forcing you to go through a stressful migration. Or they’ll add dozens of features that you’ll never want to use. Or they’ll just turn flatly evil.

My first impression would be yet another email provider…

And there is also not a single clickable link to the domain also in that blog post.

Really annoying to copy and paste urls.

The pricing page (in the FAQ section) has a "c..e@buttondown.email" address, so the grep must not have been complete :-)

(I've migrated a domain from .io to .com, I can relate)

I'm a possible customer, so I looked at the service and its pricing page and… I'm not sure if this is a service for me. I send both transactional and non-transactional E-mail, but I don't need "list management", just E-mail processing. Buttondown would be $29/month + $50/month for whitelabeling, while Postmark would be $15/month. Am I missing something?

Nah, if you don't need list management you're definitely better off going with something a little bit closer to the metal. We actually keep a price guide for comparing MTAs here (https://buttondown.com/comparison-guides/esps). I do happily recommend Postmark; they're a little bit more expensive than their peers but are worth it, IMHO.

I think some of that pricing is off. Sendmatic at least seems to suffer from some decimal placing.

Very cool page and very cool of you to do. Good luck with the biz.

Makes sense, that's kind of what I figured, but it's nice to get a confirmation. Good luck!

I remember when Teamwork's founder bought a round of drinks for everyone at a local tech meetup to celebrate acquiring the domain (teamwork.com).

I think they paid something like half a million quid for it? It was an absolutely eye watering amount to me at the time (and I think them, in fairness), but past a certain size having your .com was and probably still is big for trust.

Which is to say, congratulations! You must be delighted.

Buttondown is intended for marketing emails, like Mailchimp, right? It's not necessarily for business email like O365, Google Apps, Fastmail, etc?

I am sure it's me, but I couldn't figure this out by looking at their website. I wanted to think they have a web UI like gmail, but don't see screenshots.

I couldn't either. Some of the pages eluded to it being more for subscription email and marketing emails but nothing definite.

I thought it was for newsletters, like Substack. But I wasn't sure and now I'm even less sure.

https://buttondown.com/

Clickable link, since the blog didn’t have it.

Last time I tried to buy my .com, the seller countered at $500k. No thanks. Not convinced it'll ever be break-even at that ridiculous price. Not sure I'd even pay $85k. The return on that investment just seems... low.

We’ve been running our company’s friends and family newsletter on buttondown for more than a year and love it! Congrats on the domain purchase.

Oh so nice those fancy tlds and domain names. I have been too "clever" about 2 domains in my life already:

First is my private email which has only 4 letters and our national .nl tld. I always have to spell out the domain because it is not really a word, and it sometimes confuses Americans (non-techies) that there is no .com.

The second domain is my business domain which has .bio as tld, and now I often see people waiting for more when I say my address, like: "Hi, my address is blabla.bio", "... and?" "No, that is it, .bio is the end."

So I guess "normal" .com is just the way to go ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ (although in both cases that was just too expensive for me and I like short domains a lot myself, I once met someone who had (pattern) xx@yy.dk, apparently the whole company did, I kneeled.)

Every so often I discover a neat domain that isn't taken outside the Classic Trinity, remember that it would be impossible to share in person for this reason, and give up the dream.

Hah at least it’s two/three letters, my personal site is at .software and most people get really confused by an eight letter TLD.

Amazon SES is $0.10/1k email.

I'm a huge proponent of AWS over other providers but it's also _very_ manual and detailed.

Sometimes it's nice to let someone else do the detail work and pay to get the benefits.

As someone who has never heard of Buttondown before this, I do wonder if this is a strong enough brand name to be worth the expensive domain.

It’s not like hey.com or something, it’s kind of a clunky name in the first place.

I would have considered renaming the company and picking up a cheaper domain in the process.

Love buttondown. Have been using it for 3-4 months now and it’s everything I need without all the bullshit. Also thanks for your prompt problem solving whenever I find a bug!

I'm going to switch from buttondown to resend

imma be honest, if i get a email that comes from a buttondown.com server, for something i have never signed up for, im gonna mark as spam... email is hard, and it seams every time a new sender service pops up, It seems to get a lot of bad actors.

Your homepage says "and our spam protection is best-in-class." is that for your client inbox, or mine?

Almost all the spam I'm getting is coming from some weird re-purposed domain of an old business or unsecured mail server.

I can't recall receiving "spam" from Mailchimp, Buttondown or other newsletter companies. Especially because before you can send a significant amount of emails on these providers you have to pay a lot, or get your account verified through different means.

Seems like a bit of an overreaction on your part.

The nice thing about mailchimp et al is you can just forward the unsolicited mail to abuse@ and they’ll generally deal with the bad sender.

That's pretty much table stakes for every ISP to have a way to quickly report abuse on their network or service.

Yep, but for most b2b spam that is being sent through google suite it’s not an option.

If mailchimp et al blocked their bad senders then they wouldn't have any senders left.

Mailchimp in particular kicked out all their good senders years ago, when they made Mandrill require a Mailchimp subscription.

Do you really believe that?

Their main product is spam as a service. There's nothing to believe, you just have to look at their website for two seconds.

Ah, you’re one of those people who don’t understand that people actually do want to receive marketing emails.

Let me guess, you're a spamware developer?

    We bought the dot-com-domain and managed not to shit ourselves in the process.

Is this company HN sponsored? Why do these marketing pieces reach the frontpage?

It's one of those HN-adjacent sites that has been posted here since inception, similar to bingo card creator, oxide, starfighters, etc. I'm not opposed to it.

Because people like to read about "indie hacker" projects built by one person developing and growing? Personally I find these the most relatable stories as someone who's also trying to build profitable side projects.

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