Buttondown has been my tool of choice for several years now for sending “newsletter”-shaped content. I have a lot of emails set up with them!1 It is what I use for the per-post and weekly digest emails for this very site; it is what I use for my music newsletter; it is where I ran my weekly(ish) Across the Sundering Seas in
It is fantastic! If newsletters are a thing you need to send, you should check it out! But, as their Buttondown alternatives page says:
Buttondown is a very useful, powerful tool — but it’s not meant to be a one-size-fits-all tool. My philosophy in building Buttondown is to focus on doing a few things really, really well instead of trying to do everything okay-ish.
…and then it goes on to list a bunch of things you might consider using instead under all the conditions where Buttondown is not the best fit! It links to a bunch of offerings you would normally think of as (and which in some sense indeed are) direct competitors to Buttondown, like Ghost and ConvertKit!
This is how I want all my tools to be. There is a ton of room in these markets for healthy and friendly competition — and no need at all for winner-take-all or monopolist attitudes.
Notes
Enough to occasionally trip over weird performance issues… which they promptly fix; they are a great team. ↩︎
If you didn’t follow my work when I was writing Across the Sundering Seas, and you like my work — which I assume you do if you’re reading this footnote — you should go back and check out the archives. Some of my best writing is in those issues. ↩︎