Buttondown vs. Substack

Substack gives you less freedom and takes more money than Buttondown.

Substack is a new tool for creating paid newsletters. It's venture backed and collects 10% of your revenues generated from paid subscriptions (compared to Buttondown's 0%), and is missing some of the key features required to make an easy, technically-inclined newsletter, like support for scheduled emails, analytics, and an API.

That 10% is more than you think: if you're making $2,000 a month from your newsletter, $200 of that is lining Substack's pocket.

You shouldn't be penalized for growing: that's why Buttondown's fee doesn't grow with your newsletter's success.

Feature	Buttondown	Substack
Free for your first thousand subscribers	Because it shouldn't take a credit card to get a newsletter off the ground.
Free archives	Because sometimes you don't want your newsletters to disappear into the ether.
Embeddable widget	Have your own personal site? We'll hook you up with the code.
Analytics	Dive into individual email performance, client information, and more
Markdown support	Buttondown also supports HTML and good old fashioned plain text: whatever your preference is!
Drag and drop image uploading	Images are uploaded quickly and securely.
Email scheduling	Write an email on Thursday and send it out on Friday; queue up an entire month's worth of letters.
Free RSS support	I mean, some people _really_ like RSS.
Clean, usable design	Design is more than just how it looks, and Buttondown is designed top to bottom to make it easy to use.
Smart embeds	Embed tweets, Youtube videos, and more just by dropping in the link.
Autosaving	Never worry about accidentally closing a tab ever again.
First-party API	Everything you can do on Buttondown's interface, you can also do with our REST-ful API.
Paid subscriptions	Buttondown makes it easy and painless for you to get paid for your newsletters. Want to have a free tier? That's possible, too!
Third-party integrations	Setting up your Buttondown account to work with Zapier, IFTTT, Weebly, Squarespace, Ghost, and more.
Privacy-first	Buttondown is GDPR-compliant — and then some. I don't collect any data about you (or your subscribers), and you can turn off pixel tracking and link tracking with a click of a button.
Multiple newsletters	Want to run more than one newsletter from the same account? Buttondown's got you covered.

Kind words from happy writers.

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