Why I chose Substack but then quickly moved to Buttondown
My preferred email newsletter provider is Buttondown but when I set up my newsletter Interesting Things, I chose Substack. However, after two weeks, the warm glow of Substack had subsided and I moved it over to Buttondown. Here’s the story.
Sending bulk email costs money. Every email newsletter provider that I know of (other than Substack) provides a limited free tier and then charges money beyond that.
I’m a believer that side projects should be cashflow positive since they can sometimes be in suspended animation for long periods of time. I didn’t know how Interesting Things was going to pan out so any way to avoid costs was attractive.
(There’s also some historical background here. I previously had another unrelated email list which was gaining 200+ subscribers a month but I had lost interest in the topic and wasn’t going to post to it anymore. However, the list kept growing and I had no way to monetise it or recover costs. So I had to kill it. I guess there’s a bit of trauma residue here.)
Since Substack was free/freemium, it was liberating not having to care about how large the subscriber list got. Even if it was hundreds of thousands of subscribers, even if most of the subscribers was spam/fake, as long as I didn’t turn it into a paid subscription, I didn’t have to pay anything. As a tool, Substack would always be cashflow positive.
