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Comment by 4ar0n | Hacker News Reader

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.)

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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.

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.

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.

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