Buttondown lets you send emails to just paying subscribers of the newsletter, kinda like substack. I was playing around with the config and didn't realize it would ask people to pay! I am very dumb.
Anyway, I disabled it. There is no paying-subscriber-only content and I don't plan to offer any in the near future. Sorry about that!
There's some archive posts[1] that are only for newsletter subscribers. Those are usually first drafts of blog posts I'm writing and don't want to be shareable yet. But that's just a newsletter subscription and totally free.
I liked the post, so I filled out the newsletter signup form with my email. It immediately switched to show a credit card form to "Unlock full access" for $25/month. I was annoyed by this bait-and-switch, only to find that apparently it's all already accessible [1] and I received a confirmation email with a link to subscribe. So now I'm just confused.
[1] https://buttondown.email/hillelwayne/archive