Here is a good AI generated summary of your core USPs: "Buttondown is a reliable, creator-focused email platform that prioritizes simplicity, customer feedback, and long-term commitment. It offers powerful automation and personalization features without the complexity, bloat, or hidden costs often found in other platforms. Buttondown is designed to be dependable, transparent, and user-friendly, making it the last email platform you'll ever need."

And here is an H1 that I think works better for those USPs. "Email That Just Works – Simple, Reliable, and Built for You"

Best of success and excuse the unsolicited advise.

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.)

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

Adding Keila.io to my spreadsheet.

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

https://convertkit.com/pricing

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 beehiiv and convertkit.

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

[1]: https://hurl.dev

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

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.

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

> 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)

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

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

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.

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

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

> 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…

Really annoying to copy and paste urls.

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...

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

(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?

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

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

(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)

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!)

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.

(T/Y — fixed.)

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) [email protected], apparently the whole company did, I kneeled.)

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

Above is a clickable link, since the blog didn’t have any.

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.

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.