Why I switched my newsletters from Substack and Mailchimp to Buttondown

In September 2021, I randomly split all email subscribers to guzey.com in 3 groups, each of about 1,100 subscribers, and sent my updates via Substack, Buttondown, and Mailchimp.

Although Buttondown is not perfect, I’m going with it for now because:

1. its open rates and click rates are great and this is ultimately what I care about the most
2. it looks very good and allows to have quotes and tweet embeds
3. it’s pleasant to use, in contrast to Mailchimp, and costs almost exactly as much

Key stats and my thoughts on each platform below:

Substack:

• 39% open rate
• 54% of openers clicked a link
• looks very nice and tweet embeds look great
• user interface is great
• can’t remove branding
• free (because it has lots of VC money and because they try very hard to convert your newsletter into a paid one, from which they would earn a 10% commission)
• If Substack’s open rate wasn’t terrible, I would go with it

Buttondown:

• 46% open rate
• 53% of openers clicked a link
• looks very nice, a tiny bit worse than Substack (twitter embeds though behave somewhat worse, so my Best of Twitter newsletter stays with Substack)
• user interface is great
• $5/month/1k subscribers (with Buttondown branding and without custom domain)
• add $29/month for removing Buttondown branding and custom domain that does not work
• price at 4k subscribers when not removing Buttondown branding and not sending from custom domain: $20/month
• price at 4k subscribers when removing Buttondown branding: $49/month
• kinda buggy. For example, it very annoyingly fails to send emails from my domain despite my account’s settings claiming that everything is set up correctly and Buttondown simply ignored several of my support emails about this 🙄

Mailchimp:

• 48% open rate
• 37% of openers clicked a link (I think this is because Mailchimp’s links are black rather than blue and it’s easy to miss them)
• looks ok
• user interface is trying to kill you and editor is a giant pain in the ass (e.g. it literally does not have ability to insert quotes or embed tweets). Using Mailchimp is very unpleasant.
• unclear pricing but starts free for <2000 subscribers with Mailchimp branding
• minimum price at 4k subscribers (allows to remove Mailchimip branding): $53/month