Which platform should I use for my newsletter business?

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“Which platform should I use?”

It’s my least favorite question. About as answerable as “What should I have for dinner?” or “Where’s the best place to live?”

No one can answer this for you. It depends on what you need and what you like.

The fixation on platforms worries me as you could be blocked from a tech tool at any time. You also can’t rely on them to build your business for you. Those are dangerous waters to be swimming in. Many tech companies are deeply involved in the politics of oppression, censorship, surveillance and mass deportation. Just like you need to have a go bag for a fire or flood prone area, you need to be ready to bail on your platform quickly. Back up your audience. Know your paths to distribution. Build deep networks of support.

It’s been a while since we talked platforms, so here’s all my unfiltered thoughts on ALL THE TOOLS. Especially the ones to steer clear of.

Tool categories

• Newsletter and blogging platforms
• Membership and tip jar tools
• Websites and landing pages
• Payment processors
• Other tools you should know

Note that some of the below links are affiliate links. I may get a small commission if you sign up, at no extra cost to you.

✏️ Newsletter and blogging platforms

beehiiv, Ghost and Buttondown are the main three I’d look at for newsletters and blogging. You need to decide whether you primarily want a blog or newsletter. None of the platforms do both well.

All three of these tools have subscriptions built-in and none of them take a transaction fee from your subscription revenue. beehiiv also has an ad network you can use if you want to cover the cost of your beehiiv sub.

Best for built-in growth: beehiiv

beehiiv’s newsletter composer is well built as are their embeddable forms. They’ve also got lots of ways to juice your list growth with organic recommendations, paid recommendations and trackable referrals. I don’t love their new web builder and I am not going to learn how to use it which is why my stuff is moving to Ghost. But Project C member Quinn Emmett’s Important Not Important was created in beehiiv’s new web builder and it looks great. I’m just lazy and don’t want to spend time on web design.

Best for blogging with a side of newsletter: Ghost

What I love about Ghost is how gorgeous all the custom themes are (shout out to Norbert at Bright Themes) and how good my writing looks when published. You cannot count on Ghost for growth tooling (and I don’t think you should) and I’ve found my newsletter has grown a lot slower since I moved it there, thanks to them forcing double opt-in for newsletter subscribes and conflating “subscribe” with “pay me” on their portal pages. But my audience on Ghost is the highest quality, most engaged it’s ever been and I love using them enough to have just moved another project there.

Best for quick start of a newsletter: Buttondown

Andy Dehnart from reality blurred put these guys on my radar and I’ve become a fast fan. Buttondown has everything you need to run a newsletter or a newsletter business—including built-in automations—and no more. For everyone who thinks Substack is their only “easy to use” option, I’d check out Buttondown. You’ll be launched within an hour. Bonus is that they are bootstrapped. Be warned that your web archive will not be a blog, and if you want a blog, you should look at Ghost or beehiiv.

Best for people who like WordPress: WordPress

Some people like WordPress. Those people would not be me. They’re only on this list because Andy and Maliha from The Side Blogger use WP and I respect them a lot so there must be reasons smart people like them choose it. If you are a WordPress fan, you’re in great company with thousands of publishers.

Honorable mentions

Kit has made a transition into the newsletter space (from creator email marketing) but their tool is fairly complex to learn if you’re not already an email marketer. It has everything you could possible need (and too much of it) and they just raised prices so I’m hearing people grumble about leaving right now.

MailerLite and Email Octopus are relevant if you’ve ignored my advice about Substack and you need a backup email marketing tool. They both handle automations you can use to sell subscriptions and communicate with members. Email Octopus has a generous free plan up to 2500 newsletter subscribers.

Steer clear

Lede and Indiegraf are newsroom solutions built on WordPress. The only thing worse than WordPress is having some intermediary company control the code to your WordPress. Nearly everyone I talk to on either of these is looking to leave.

Don’t bother with Kajabi unless you primarily sell courses or programs. Don’t use Substack unless you like giving up major chunks of your audience and revenue.

🫙 Membership and tip jar tools

You can run a subscription from inside beehiiv, Ghost, or Buttondown, but if you want publish on multiple channels or you just want more robust membership tooling, you can have a look at these standalone membership tools.

Why might you want to do this? Well, membership operation is a lot of work! You’ll need to deliver perks, communicate with members, anticipate and respond to cancellations, answer support requests and sell your membership itself.

Best standalone membership tool: Memberful

Memberful offers subscription management without being tied to your publishing platforms. Particularly a good idea if you were thinking about Patreon, if you aren’t sold on your newsletter/blog choice yet or if you want features your publishing platform doesn’t have. Major warning sign on Memberful is that they’re owned by Patreon, but as far as I can tell, they still integrate with Stripe. They do charge double fees though. You pay them upfront and they charge 5% on top of Stripe. You’ll have to do the math on whether this is worth it based on your membership size.

Best standalone tip jar: Ko-fi

If you want to offer multiple ways to pay you, Ko-fi is a solid option. They allow you to sell memberships, commissions and products alongside a tip jar, all from one simple storefront. Ko-fi uses Stripe for payments and they take an additional 5% on every transaction, though you can pay a small subscription fee to remove that. Good to check out if you’ve been learning towards Patreon. Super responsive team if you have any problems which is the number one reason I’m not recommending Buy Me a Coffee. Their design is super cute and weirdly, no one seems to work there!

Best membership tool for Ghost: Outpost

Add Outpost onto your Ghost and you’ll get a bunch of membership perks and communication tools you’ll need like automated paid welcome emails, private podcast links, retention flows, win backs and failed payment recovery. They also create a tip jar for you and they tag your donors in your Ghost database. Plus, Outpost helps you sell your membership with call to actions and upsell sequences. If you don’t use Outpost, you’ll need to use something because it’s pretty weird to join a membership and not get so much as a “Thanks for joining” note.

Steer clear

Circle and Mighty Networks are all-in community platforms and I would avoid them unless you intend to run a forum-based membership with course material attached. They’re very clunky, hard to get members to adopt and expensive.

Also, I would never recommend Patreon because you can’t take your audience with you if you leave and because their fees are the highest next to Substack.

💻️ Websites and landing pages

If you’re using Ghost or beehiiv, you can make your landing pages there, but if you need another way to do that, you might turn to a web design tool.

For example, last week when everyone in our Slack was getting cranky about Ghost’s double opt-in for newsletters, I realized I was also cranky about that and I made a standalone landing page in Carrd that sends people through Zapier into Ghost.

Best landing page tool: Carrd

Carrd has super simple templates and it’s easy to stand up a page for newsletter subscribers, events, or subscriptions. It doesn’t have fancy landing page gear like AB testing and deep attribution—you need something like Leadpages or Unbounce for that—but it’s free to launch a page on Carrd and it’s only $19/year to add a custom domain.

Best web design tool: Framer

Of all the pure web design tools out there, I like Framer the best, but I will say it’s a hassle to learn if you’re not familiar with web design. Designers fawn over Framer so there are tons of custom themes. Framer is VC-backed but they’ve been around over a decade and they’re based in the Netherlands. Their blog feature is an absolute nightmare so they’re not a replacement for Ghost or WordPress.

Honorable mention

Showit is worth looking at if Framer seems like too much and Carrd seems like too little. It’s a drag and drop web builder that competes with Squarespace. Showit was built by bootstrapped founders and it has 20 years+ on the market.

Steer clear

Squarespace sold to private equity last year, the only thing worse than venture capital. Their service is now regularly unstable which means you’d lose anyone you were trying to send through these pages whenever your site goes down once a week.

Wix is also just a total hot mess. Nothing good to say about them.

💰️ Payment processors

Right now, in many countries including the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom—where much of this audience is based—Stripe is the best payment processor to go with and it will typically be the default choice. It’s integrated into most of the tools we’re looking at, it’s reliable, it’s flexible, it handles things like chargebacks and taxes (if you want) and it does nice reporting for you.

However, there are some signs that Stripe could increase censorship of LGBTQIA+ creators OR concerns that Stripe could be targeted by the US federal government. So, it’s good to know your back ups.

Alternatives to Stripe

Recurly was created for tech companies who run subscriptions, like Twitch and SproutSocial, but they are used in non-tech spaces too. My lawyers who run a legal subscription used Recurly to bill us. There’s a hefty upfront fee with Recurly—I believe around $250/mo—plus you pay per transaction and there’s not a whole lot you get for that beyond what Stripe offers. If you’re processing more than $5k MRR, it’s worth looking at should you need to move. Recurly is also US-based but they support companies in hundreds of countries including Canada and the UK.

Adyen mostly serves tech companies and enterprise businesses but their pricing seems relatively small business friendly and their design is sleek. They charge a variable processing fee based on which payment method is used but there’s no upfront fee. Adyen supports businesses all over the world including in Australia, the UK, Canada, France, Germany and the US and they’re based in the Netherlands.

Mollie is only available to you if you’re in the UK, the EU or one of the countries here (not US or Canada). It’s more of a Square competitor but it does handle memberships and there’s no upfront fee, just a per transaction fee. They’re based in (you guessed it) the Netherlands and they’ve been around more than 20 years.

Square is geared toward brick and mortar and e-commerce sellers. They are fairly high profile, venture-backed, US-based and could also be a target alongside Stripe, but so far they haven’t been mentioned much lately. Square does offer a subscription solution as well as regular online transactions, but it’s much simpler than what Stripe handles. They have different pricing plans, one with no upfront fee and others with one, and the transaction fee changes based on your plan but it’s higher than Stripe on the base plan.

Steer clear

I’d personally avoid Paddle ever since they lost about $30k of startup Senja’s money and had no idea where it could have gone (they later found it.)

PayPal blocked me with no recourse when I started my business until I got ahold of some executives so, for me, they will always be dead last.

🛠️ Other tools you should know

Best for failed payments: Stunning

The bigger your subscription grows, the more failed payments you will have. Stunning gives you more ways to prevent failed payments and recoup that subscription revenue.

Best for connecting tools together: Zapier

Zapier is your best friend for getting apps to work together. They integrate with nearly everything (except Substack) and they help you send data from one place to another. I use Zapier to add new subscribers to perks and make sure canceled subscribers are removed from them.

Best for web analytics: Plausible

Plausible is a privacy-focused website analytics tool that you can use to see where your traffic is coming from and what stories people are reading on your site. It’s about 1000x more straightforward than Google Analytics and it’s only $90/year to start but good news if you use Outpost because it’s FREE for you.

Best for forms: Fillout

I don’t know about you, but I use so many forms with my subscriptions. Welcome forms, reader surveys, perk fulfillment, event RSVPs. Fillout is beautiful and has the most insanely generous free plan. It also integrates with other tools like Airtable and Zapier so you can send the data elsewhere.

Which tools are right for you?

The right tools for you are the ones that solve the problems you have right now in the way you want them solved. I’d pay attention to how long a company has been around, where their funding comes from and what other customers say but as long as you can move your people and your revenue, it will all be ok.

Focus on producing great work and on building your own paths to your audience and let tech support your operation, not run the operation.