Instant love for geeks – Buttondown review

In my searching for an affordable early-stage-friendy simple mailer I came across this unique, distraction-free minimalist email tool, that I immediately became curious about.

Note: Although Buttondown compares itself to other email marketing tools on it’s page, at its essence it is closer to Substack or Revue. A periodic newsletter publishing tool, a blog delivered over email.

Is Buttondown affordable?

While I am very curious to explore the tool, I’m gonna point out right away that the pricing structure is off.

It’s generally disadvantageous (for you) to merge function tiers with list-size based pricing. It’s better if you can access all features, and the price increases as your list does.

Here, automations are only accessible from the 79/mo-10ksubs Pro tier. That is an expensive starting price. You can start with more advanced automation tools for much less.

Webhooks and integrations are from $29/mo, good till 5k. But you probably need to use these right away, to be able to update tags segment properly.

So I don’t like the steps and the feature tier structure.

Below 29/mo, you can only send out newsletters, one by one. Substack or Revue gives you that for free.

Buttondown UX – made with heart

This is probably the most unique mailer I came across for a long time. It is clearly a love project of a cool, honest guy, with a very strong concept in mind.

It not easy to cut off everything non-essential, and build the cleanest, most pure minimalist tool possible.

And Buttondown achieved exactly that. And I love it.

And it has an unmistakably no bs., straight-to-the-point, open-source vibe. Feels a bit like Logseq or Workflowy compared to the bloated mainstream note taking tools like Evernote.

Welcome dashboard? Tabs on tabs? Graphs? Silly cartoon animals holding a mail in mouth? Nah, f*ck all that.

The settings welcome you, because you need to go through it anyway. A long scroll with a guide on the side to know how long you need to hold your breath.

This initial setup – although looks long – is rather simple and linear. Mostly writing. I like that you can control the sign up experience relatively well, sending welcomes and double options. (This is much needed since you don’t even get 1 autoresponder like in Audienceful.)

This part it still is literally the most complex process you have to go through in the tool.

Beyond – as shown in the left – you are only able to do what you came here for –

Emails. To people.

a Piece of paper with a send button

The editor is as noiseless as it can possibly be.

If you don’t like cluttered, had been traumatized by Microsoft in your youth, this will feel like a runaway resort.
You are essentially getting a markdown editor with a send button. I’m not sure I’ll be fine with that after the pink cloud dissolves, but for now, I’m loving it.

On the top right, you can preview your masterpiece, or turn on a minimal rich text editor, if you are soft and can’t handle the inner tranquility. (I turned it on of course…)

Similarly to Markdown writers, a template is applied to your bare, unformatted text, once it’s sent out.

The design is clean and tasteful (as expected), with much similarity to Substack emails. For one, I don’t like that ‘someone forward you this…’ taking a pee there in the middle, but you don’t have much customization to it. In the settings you can change the link colors.

For anything beyond – changing fonts, sizes etc. you have to tweak the template by adding a CSS code.
This may freak you out, but documentation is friendly and detailed, both giving you a sample code and explaining why you don’t want to bother doing that. (you have to be on the paid tier to apply it)

Segmentation?

Segmentation is quite limited in the free & $9/mo tiers. You get a barebone list of your contacts and metadata – that you can either add manually or change by API.

From the 29/mo tier, however, Buttondown buttons up and gives you automated tag– and custom fields management. Not only that, but you can also segment by survey responses.

I also like that little touch that you can add colors to your tags.

More than enough for maintaining a nice segmented list for email marketing purposes – not just running a simple newsletter publishing business.

Segmentation is really 9 out of 10.
Tags and metadata (custom fields) could be integrated better into forms – other than that, it’s fine.

Automation is surprisingly awesome.

The automation functionality of Buttondown is just as simple and just as SUPERB as the rest of the tool.

The only limitation is that you can’t stack multiple steps.

So practically, if you want to build a sequence, it will be one automation after another using the same filters with increasing delays.

But as for triggers, filters, and actions, I have no complaints.

Then action wise – the options are plenty. You can notify yourself at tags, change metadata, and even send webhooks to a third-party tool.

As for sending emails, you also have a few surprising options like selecting the preferred time of the day. Awesome.

Automations are 6 out of 10.

Completely usable maybe only multiple actions are a bit of a miss. But it is still providing about everything that you would need for good email marketing (apart from some of the more fancy automation features like exact date based triggers or negative delays (i.e. counting back)

… But to be honest, at least it’s clean and simple.

You can’t overcomplicate things to your demise. By that alone, it would be easily a 7/10.

The reason why it’s only 6 is because since you need to have a new automation per each step, it can get unwieldy after a while. For an extra point, it would be nice to have some type of organization for the automations like folders. (There is automatic grouping tho by the triggers.)

can Buttondown be your email marketing tool?

The great

The vibe. The Editor. The pure simplicity of just writing your heart out and sending it to your subscribers.

Buttondown is lovely to work with, and I think that benefits you over the long term more than advanced (ie. comlex) automation with shitty editor. (eg. Highlevel)

The price?

In my first impression review, my main gripe was with the pricing. To get the Fundamental email marketing functionality, it will start at $29/month.

For context, that is the same that you would pay for ConvertKit. But truth to be told, that price will stay at $29 up until 5,000. And you can have multiple email businesses separately, separate domain, and you pay for the collective sum. That’s neat.

Then the $79/mo is again a bit of a steep jump – Getting us to the same round as ConvertKit, Loops, Audienceful, Aweber, just to name a few. But the truth is, the more cheap Birdsend, only do plain text, and MailerLite sucks UX, analytics, editor-wise. (everything-wise).

Now I want to say if you sell courses, services, products you will need an integrator (Zapier, N8N, etc) or webhooks to properly tag and manage your list, but if that’s not a deal breaker for you, Buttondown is the

It exells as a paid newsletter publishing tool –
Blogging by email – and it won’t stand in your way for building up and mailing your list in any niche if you primary rely on broadcasts.

Particularly if you keep you email super-tight. 3-4k engaged, well converting subs will pay for the 29/mo most 20-50x, even from just affiliate offers.

PS: While I don’t have a much experience in the other alternatives, other than trying them briefly (Substack, Curated, Revue) but against that lot, I’d go with Buttondown. (I recently reviewed another great one, called Audienceful)