Hey honeys and hustlers,

I am (un)fortunately here to add to the cascade of emails flooding your inbox on the busiest e-commerce weekend of the year. However, I hope this email is a far cry from the sales emails from brands you thought you had unsubscribed from ages ago. While I am doing a sale on CommunityOS, I’m here for another reason – to wax poetic about my last Black Friday purchase, a paid subscription to beehiiv. I switched from Substack to beehiiv last year this weekend, and I couldn’t be happier with that decision. In this 1-year reflection, I’ll be sharing what’s changed since I moved to this email service provider (you can read my 3-month reflection here), my overall thoughts and impressions of beehiiv as an email service provider, and which platform I think is a better comparison to beehiiv than Substack. This is a fairly long one, so before we begin, a little snapshot of where both of my newsletters currently are:

P.S. Here’s a little preview of what’s in store for year 2, our referral program. Let me know if your link works!

In the past 9 months, beehiiv has shipped a lot of new features. They’ve made the ad network more refined and consistent. They’ve made the dashboard more user-friendly and given it almost YouTube-level information. They’ve launched website functionality for all paid users, including the ability to embed YouTube and podcast RSS feeds. During the winter release virtual event, they announced AI website functionality (aka vibe coding) and website analytics. There are a few wrinkles in the website's functionality: the vibe coding can only do what beehiiv websites can do, so it can’t actually create anything from scratch like a true vibe coding tool. The podcast RSS feed is cool, but I don’t think it's yet a replacement for PodPage or the like if you already have episode pages mapped to a custom domain. With the new website up and running, I finally added my official domain name to my beehiiv website. The smart warming of my domain was relatively smooth and painless. I have, however, had complaints about my newsletter ending up in the spam folder, so we’re looking into that (thank you to the folks who let me know we were landing there!).

They’ve also added the ability to sell and create products, again, with a hitch. While you can currently create digital products, any products (such as consulting) that require calendar integration are reserved for Max plan users. They say courses and physical products (like merch) are coming in Q1 2026, but they didn’t mention creating discounts, bundles, upsells, or connecting sales to segments and automations. beehiiv often launches things quickly with lots of quirks. It takes them a minute to iron out the kinks, but generally speaking, I appreciate how responsive the team is to issues and their bias toward action.

I’ve launched a product on beehiiv using their segmentation and automation tools. I’ve launched a referral program on beehiiv (see above). I’ve A/B tested titles and subject lines. I’ve created lead magnets. I’ve grown relationships with other writers. I’ve made money on beehiiv through their ad network and affiliate program. Ultimately, I’ve been able to have the relationship I want with the communities I’m building. I feel like I have better data to inform decisions on title formats and link placements.

beehiiv feels like a platform akin to Shopify for creators. It’s a platform that I feel I can grow with and build a business on. Their AI chatbot, support team, and Slack channel are great avenues for learning and getting help with any questions or problems I may have. While they haven’t shipped a few features I still want to see, like the ability to save sections of an email as templates and to edit content tags in bulk, they aren’t dealbreakers at the moment. I think there’s still some work to be done on the website and product fronts, but they will come in the next year at the rate beehiiv ships and reiterates features. I’d like to make and sell email newsletter templates as a digital product, and to sell a few physical products that I’m working on natively in email, and I think those features will come.

I stopped doing paid subscriptions in favor of donations, digital products, a course, and soon-to-come physical products. While Substack’s main/only native monetization feature is paid subscriptions, I now think there are many other reasons why Substack is not a comparable platform to beehiiv. Substack (long-form social media with fan support) and Patreon (attempting to be long-form social media with fan support and products) are better comparisons, whereas beehiiv is coming for Kit with the gloves off. Ghost and buttondown are somewhere in between – great email service providers with tiers for fan support, but as open source platforms, they don’t seem to be intending to jump into the social discovery algorithm game.

So let’s talk about the elephant in the room…

Kit, led by Nathan Barry, is a bootstrapped 8-figure email service provider business that had many of the features beehiiv had before beehiiv. beehiiv boosts (the feature allowing writers to get paid for recommending subscribers to other newsletters) was done by Kit when they acquired Sparkloop and natively integrated that feature into their product. Kit can generate paid subscriptions, though it takes a cut, whereas beehiiv does not. beehiiv and Substack have native referral programs that let readers earn rewards for sharing your newsletter, while Kit does not. Kit has long had the ability to create lead magnets and sell digital products, both of which are relatively new to beehiiv. They’ve recently changed their pricing structure to give writers up to 10,000 subscribers on their free plan, making them more generous than beehiiv in that department. They allow conditional email content, which beehiiv calls dynamic content, on all plans instead of just the higher tiers. So why are they not a more seemingly competitive alternative to beehiiv, Substack, or other options?

I’m not 100% sure where the breakdown happened, but I can share my perspective.

While I don’t mind Kit’s rebrand, I’m not one of their previous customers who had issues with deliverability during that time. I also think Nathan Barry does genuinely care about creators, so I have no problem with him personally. I think my main issues with Kit had to do with their focus and ethos vs. beehiiv’s. beehiiv has a community like no other, and they are decently transparent with their roadmap. I knew they acquired Typedream around the time that I upgraded, and I feel that having a website for a newsletter community like the one I’m building is extremely important. Kit didn’t have that, and it still doesn’t have true website functionality beyond landing pages. I had the option to choose a referral program and paid subscriptions on beehiiv, and I wanted to keep both, even though I don’t currently use one of those features. Kit takes a percentage (albeit smaller than Substack’s) of paid subscriptions and doesn’t have a referral program for digital or physical products.

While I believe Kit does allow you to save sections of a newsletter, I think newsletter template functionality in general allows me decent enough workarounds. beehiiv’s native ad network was also a big reason for my switch. Who doesn’t want to get paid to write? Boosts/paid recommendations, paid subscriptions, and digital products are great revenue streams. However, I didn’t like doing boosts/paid recommendations, I stopped doing paid subscriptions, and I didn’t have any digital products to speak of when I started writing. CPC (cost per click) and CPM (cost per mille) ads aren’t the most lucrative, but they’re a good place to start when you’re growing a newsletter.

I think the business of email will continue to grow and become the foundation for many businesses, not just e-commerce and direct-to-consumer brands. The brands that will win the most writers are the ones that understand the connection between commerce, brand voice, connection, and discovery. Right now, that brand for me is beehiiv. If you want to give them a try, click the link for 20% off any paid plan for the first 3 months.

Happy writing!