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What it costs to run a software business in 2023
I am a sucker for a good list of running costs, dating back to seeing Cushion's, back in 2015. I think it lends an earnest and unglamorous look as to what it really takes to a business in the way that "hustle porn"-type essays rarely do.
I've done a poor job of keeping my own such running cost document (though I'd like to do a better job!), but in lieu of a beautiful chart like Cushion's I'll try and offer something sloppier: a screenshot of my finances table!
(As context, Buttondown posts around low five figures of monthly revenue, so this is a pretty healthy margin.)
Some notes on these numbers:
- My Stripe fees are a goose-egg thanks to Stripe offering a huge amount of free credits to alumni. This would otherwise be one of my largest costs.
- Instead, my largest cost is Heroku, which is coincidentally the cost I'm least happy with. Buttondown does not serve enough traffic to warrant five hundred dollars a month; in fact, the lion's share of that money goes towards a Redis cluster and auto-scaling asynchronous queues. A goal of mine for later this quarter is to migrate onto a more modern, cheaper solution like Render — which I've napkin math'd out to be closer to $150/month.
- Of the things I pay for that I'm least satisfied with regardless of cost, PagerDuty and StatusPage share the award. Neither of these are good products for my use case, and I deeply wish to migrate to Better Uptime. But the trap that you quickly run into is that $60/month is simply not an urgent enough level of cost to prioritize migration, and so I toil away using these subpar tools. (I'll switch off of them probably when I also switch off of Heroku.)
- I spend a lot on sending emails. Sending emails is not free! I have three active ESPs — Postmark, Mailgun, and AWS — for various use cases, as well as a dormant ESP (Sendgrid) for failover's sake (it's currently on the free tier, as I only send through enough traffic to make sure the plumbing doesn't explode).
Beyond that, nothing much to report. There's a slew of things that cost somewhere between $5—$30/month for which I use the following heuristic: does this provide at least fifteen minutes' worth of value? If so, great. That's perhaps a low bar, but it's certainly a higher one than at big technical companies (where the bar might be "has someone used this tool in the past year? okay, we won't churn from our four-digit plan".)
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What customers say about Buttondown
I, like almost everyone else I've seen talk about Buttondown, am IMMENSELY happy and impressed with your customer service. It turns out we can have nice things, which is really refreshing.
—Ed Yong, Staff writer, The Atlantic
Email makes the world go ‘round, and
Buttondown
is how I manage it all for my keyboard projects.
—Tim van Damme, Founder, MVKB
It's a truth, that should be more universally acknowledged, that Buttondown is the best newsletter software. Simple, does exactly what it sets out to do, and reasonably priced.
—Noel Welsh, Founder, Inner Product
Buttondown is the perfect fit for my headless newsletter use case. And I contacted support with some specific requests and Justin responded within 30 minutes with great answers and a nice pinch of charm.
—Sam Roberts, Software engineer, Tamr
Hands down the easiest way to run a newsletter - and the free version is generous!
—Javeed Khatree, SEO expert
With API and Markdown support, you can build workflows that make it so easy to write.
—Westley Winks, Peace Corps
I’ve never enjoyed writing newsletters as much as I do with Buttondown.
—Kevin Lewis, You Got This!
Buttondown remains the easiest thing I use regularly, and I am grateful for that.
—Casey, Journalist
It's a humble app doing a common job but with end users in mind.
—Si Jobling, Engineering Manager
Buttondown has been an amazing experience for me. The service is constantly being improved and customer service is the best. My newsletter with Buttondown has grown from a fairly small list to over 15,000 subscribers, and it hasn't broken a sweat yet.
—Cassidy Williams, CTO, Contenda
I switched over to Buttondown from Mailchimp because of the difficulty I had with Mailchimp's campaigns, so Buttondown's easy and user-friendly system has been a genuine breath of fresh air.
—Jessi Eoin, Illustrator + Comic Artist
You’ve truly built a great product that I feel good about using (vs a monopoly from our tech overlords).
—Rachel, 2030 Camp
I love how personal Buttondown feels, especially compared to Mailchimp, Convertkit, and services like that.
—Simen Strøm Braaten, Designer
This product has been exactly what I’ve needed!
—Nathan Bird, Podcast host, Chattanooga Civics
It's already so refreshing compared to the mega companies.
—Casey Watts, Author, Debugging Your Brain
Definitely will be using for the foreseeable future. It’s a great service and I feel well cared for. Thank you!
—Phoebe Sinclair, Author
I’m a sucker for elegant UI and I really love your site, but above that I think your product has so much value for so many different people. I’m not a coder, I’m only familiar with the bare basics, but I was able to figure out and utilise Buttondown quickly.
—Claudia Nathan, Founder, The Repository
The killer feature for me: Buttondown will take an RSS feed then automatically slurp up the content (in their words) and then send it to our subscribers. Job done. They seem like a good company too, so I’d say this is a winner.
—Andy Bell, Founder, Set Studio
As a recent user of Buttondown, they are super on the ball. A week ago I discovered a security vulnerability and reported it on Friday afternoon. They acknowledged and fixed it in under two hours. On a Friday night! Talk about going above and beyond for your users!
—Predrag Gruevski, Principal Engineer, Kensho
Well may I just say your support experience is already approximately 1 billion times better than ConvertKit. Excited to be switching!
—Michael J. Metts, Author, Writing is Designing
Privacy focused sending and sign up form; lets me focus on writing - editor is "just" markdown; simple, elegant design template looks like a blog post; the founder is amazing - he's helped with every question I've had, even outside of Buttondown.
—Joe Masilotti, Founder, RailsDevs
We need more nice and professional services like yours on the web.
—Tobias Horvath, Designer and developer
No one is paying me to say this, but I love @buttondown so far for my lil newsletter. It’s so smart, simple, and attractive (and to my knowledge, not actively anti-trans!). Customer service is also legitimately excellent.
—Julie Kliegman, Copy chief, Sports Illustrated
I love it! It lets me breathe, not compete as I write with other writers.
—Devin Kate Pope, Writer and editor
It’s a pleasure working with you. Thank you! (And what a contrast with Mailchimp, where I spent two weeks and a dozen of emails trying find out why our form goes down sometimes (only sometimes), and never really got a real answer.)
—Anton Sotkov, Software Engineer, IA
Buttondown exemplifies how I wish most software worked, and I hope to achieve a similar thing with the software I develop in the future.
—Matt Favero, Software engineer
It feels incomparably good to be able to email just like a guy named Justin when you have a
@buttondown
question 15 minutes before you’re about to blast a Geistlist email. (Not a guarantee but wow this guy is human-level good.)
—Jacob Ford, Designer About Town
Enter Buttondown, Justin Duke’s lovely little newsletter tool. It’s small, elegant, and integrates well. And it is also eminently affordable.
—Will Buckingham, Author
Your settings page is a joy to use and everything about Buttondown makes me happy.
—Gareth Jelley, Magazine editor
have been on Buttondown for ~18 months and I can't recommend it enough.
—Elizabeth Minkel, Podcast host
You really do make ALL other customer service look terrible by comparison.
—Chris Mead, Improv teacher
There is a caring person on the other side of this software, which is one of the things I like the most about Buttondown.
—Keith Calder, Film & TV Producer
I’d also like to add that @buttondown is an absolute joy to use. Hats off, Justin!
—Elliot Jay Stocks, Creative Director, Google Fonts
Shoutout to
@buttondown
and
@jmduke
for building an amazing bootstrapped product for newsletters, all while being very open to feedback and connecting directly with customers 🙏
Easily one of the most enjoyable product experiences I've had.
—Den Delimarsky, Head of Ecosystem, Netlify
if you are looking for "newsletter tool for hackers" i tentatively believe the answer is @buttondown
full api, compose in markdown, good docs for setting up domain auth, simple subscribe form HTML that you style yourself (or not)
—Brian David Hall, Author, Your Website Sucks
I really like @buttondown as a blogging platform, it has the simplicity of Substack but the corporate culture is less toxic.
—Chad Loder, Extremism researcher
I worked with @buttondown and asked for some new payment support beyond the supporter single tier / pay-what-you-want options.
Justin was great and built it in just a couple days.
—Dan Hon, Author & consultant
I write nonfiction and I use @buttondown buttondown.email/Changeset - indie, GREAT personal customer support, very nice default styling, all the options I want including ones to protect my readers' privacy
—Sumana Harihareswara, Open source maintainer
I use @buttondown because it does exactly what I need (manage subscribers and send markdown emails), not more and not less 👍 As a bonus it's made by an indie dev which I love!
—Max Stober, Founder, GraphCDN
If you’re considering running an email newsletter, or if you already run one and are considering a change of provider, I highly recommend @buttondownemail. Super-easy app, very fair pricing with a generous free tier, and exemplary support. 💯
—Peter Gasston, Technologist and speaker
imo @buttondown is easily one of the best-designed services i’ve used in recent years, if you have a substack you should really consider switching!
—Kabir Goel, Engineer, Cal
Thanks for getting me excited about email newsletters again.
—Garrick van Buren
I'm very thrilled that I can just write in Markdown without having to deal with email builders and all that crap.
—Parham Doustdar
Thanks again for all the help! You’ve really turned something super complex into something super easy – sending new issues is as simple as firing off a text message.
—Kartik Chaturvedi
Thanks for creating a simple way for people who want to, like, put words in a hole and have it sent to people... I am just thankful that something just nice and human exists on the internet.
—Emmanuel Quartey
I tried 3 other newsletter services today and I felt like wanting to rip my hair out. They were all painfully slow. I'm so glad I found Buttondown.
—Mohamed Elbadwihi
I’ve found Buttondown to be a great fit for my workflow and have been delighted by all of Justin’s thoughtful features and improvements to the product.
—Michael Lee
Like seriously, so many lovely little easter eggs in one could-be-boring service.
—Alexandra Muck
I just switched over from Tinyletter and I'm really excited to have found a place to host my tiny newsletter that doesn't seem like it's assuming everyone sending newsletters is an email marketer / growth hacker.
—Tessa Alexanian
I'm in love with the simplicity of Buttondown.
—Ekfan
I’ve used similar tools in the past and Buttondown is by far the simplest to use and most promising.
—Fabrizio Rinaldi
Thank you for creating such a simple and brilliant tool. I’ve just signed up and the experience has been smooth and painless (the docs are great too!)
—Oliver Holms
As a developer who has hated every email system I've ever used this is so nice.
—Drew Hornbein
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