Evaluating newsletter platforms (pt 1)
Vivisecting Buttondown, beehiiv, ecosend, and others.
Reading time: 3 minutes (not including the appendices).
Wanted: newsletter platform, renewable powered, no nazis.
The candidates:
Ghost Pro: powerful features, non-profit, climate neutral (or…is it?)
Ecosend: “Our mission is to eliminate the carbon footprint of email marketing”
Beehiiv: several newsletters I follow moved there, and the co-founder said “no nazis ever”
Buttondown: looks cool
Wordpress.com Newsletter : they do newsletters now
Results
Who won? … it depends!
How do you feel about Amazon Web Services? It’s greenish, but it’s Amazon (more below).
Do you think Direct Air Capture is a priority climate solution? I don’t. But startups can’t get enough of it.
Features and price.
I’m deferring a decision while I do more evaluation. Which means I have to write a part 2 of this guide.
Category winners
Cheapest: Beehiiv
Best for no nazis: Can’t tell. It all comes down to how each platform chooses to interpret their Acceptable Use Policy.
Best for green hosting (non-AWS): host it yourself. If AWS isn’t a deal-breaker, then any of them.
Best non-AWS green-hosted with integrated billing:
Best if I was leaving Mailchimp, not Substack: Ecosend - seems a great Mailchimp replacement, but isn’t the same sort of product as Substack.
Best climate policy: Buttondown … or Ecosend … or maybe Wordpress.
Evaluation
Pricing
Most use tiered pricing based on subscriber count. SustainableUX has a modest ~2,300 (growing steadily - thanks, y’all!).
Cheapest for me now: beehiiv ($0).
At 5,500 subs: 3 way tie between beehiiv - buttondown - Ghost ($~80ish).
Note that most of these also have a cheaper starter tier:
Buttondown: $0 for first 100 subs
Ghost Pro : Starter tier (500 subs): $9
Ecosend’s cheapest tier is $37 for 1000 contacts.
Green hosting
Most of these platforms use Amazon Web Services (AWS) for hosting.
AWS: Ecosend, Beehiiv (report), Buttondown (at least partly).
Not keen on AWS? Wordpress.com’s own data centers are 50% renewable - or self-green-host (Ghost, Wordpress).
Why Amazon Web Services isn’t my cup of tea
AWS is mostly renewable hosted.
But not in all regions. See this Green Web Foundation post.
Amazon is not seen as a good climate citizen. Ref: Amazon's climate pollution is getting way worse (The Verge), Amazon is failing it’s own climate pledge (Amazon Employees for Climate Justice)
Many people just don’t want to do business with Amazon because ethics.
More: Green Digest Review deep dive into Amazon’s environmental impact.
I’m not sweating green hosting too much
At most, my newsletter has an annual footprint of 3kg, same as two rolls of toilet paper. I can buy a quality offset for $20 and cover that carbon cost for 333 years.
But, this is the SustainableUX newsletter, and we have a principle to uphold. So I’ll keep looking for a renewable-powered option.
Climate stance
Aside from green hosting, how do these platforms engage with climate change issues?
Buttondown might contribute the largest share of revenue to climate overall.
Ecosend and Automattic (wordpress.com) have a lot to say about climate - I’ll unpick that later.
Stripe Climate: a big bet on Direct Air Capture (or, kicking the can down the road)
Buttondown and Ghost use Stripe Climate to meet their climate commitments. Stripe Climate’s approach is all about carbon capture, including direct air capture. I’m persuaded that there are better and more impactful ways to fight climate change. See appendix A for details, or just read this piece by MIT Tech.
Content policies
None of the platforms I reviewed had an upfront “here is what we do and do not allow” statement.
Buttondown and Beehiiv’s CEOs both made anti-nazi statements in public, but not on their websites.
As an experiment, I tried to find far-right newsletters hosted on each platform (this was not fun). The only one I found was on Buttondown - who took it down immediately.
Legal eagle eye
Ghost, Beehiiv and Buttondown have standard TOS / AUP language about not inciting violence. But then, so does substack:
Substack left the door open for the far-right authors, as long as they don’t openly call for violence. So, it comes down to how each platform chooses to interpret their legal terms.
Coming in part 2!
I blew past the word limit, so let’s stop here. Coming next:
feature evaluation
comparing values
Thanks for reading!
Reader interest poll (please do this)
Did anyone make it to the bottom of this essay? Please click so I can get a sense of whether to keep doing this sort of thing.
APPENDIX A: STRIPE CLIMATE
I don’t love Stripe Climate because it only looks to the “capture” part of avoid-reduce-capture. Carbon capture is unproven and distracts from cheaper methods that prevent CO2 in the first place (according to the U.N.).
How it works: Stripe Climate passes money through to Frontier Climate, who invest it with their portfolio of carbon removal startups. The startups make a pledge that they will then store a certain amount of CO2, in the future, once they have figured out how.
These projects might store carbon in the future, they might scale, and they could possibly become cheap enough to be worth it. Or, not. Sez Frontier:
Because the carbon removal industry is in its early stages, it’s likely that some suppliers will be delayed or fail to deliver. Accordingly, Frontier cannot provide specific dates, protocols, annual amounts of carbon removed, governing standards, registry names, and other details until the carbon removal tons are verified and delivered. - Frontier’s Disclosure
In other words, a gamble.
And it’s expensive. Frontier has collected $277.4M, and delivered 1,716 tons CO2 - with another 510,205 tons “contracted”.
The math sucks (but not CO2 lol). You can buy traditional offsets for 1,716 tons CO2 for $34,000. Conversely, $277M would buy 13,850,000 tons of quality offsets.
Offsets are also problematic, true. One solution: invest in carbon avoidance projects directly. For instance - food waste reduction initiatives, insulation for low income housing. Or just build one giant solar farm - like this $200M, 134 megawatt example. Which would avoid 25,000 tons of CO2 a year, every year.
The priority is cutting emissions, now. Stripe’s projects don’t do that.
The case for carbon avoidance technologies: A megaton of prevention is worth a gigaton of cure (World Economic Forum)
Carbon removal hype is becoming a dangerous distraction (MIT Technology Review)
And another thing: deceptive design
The consumer-facing version of Stripe Climate is borderline deceptive. Customers clicking the “donate for carbon removal” are probably thinking that they are somehow offsetting the CO2 associated with their order. Which isn’t what is happening.