s4saas4that

Buttondown review

Free tier

Markdown-native newsletters, built for writers

I built Buttondown so writers could send newsletters without bloat, priced fairly by subscriber count.

Entry price

Free

Free: Free for your first 100 subscribers

Our Buttondown verdict

Buttondown costs free. Nobody has reviewed it here yet, so this page is about what it costs and what it does, not how well it does it.

Solo writers and indie newsletter creators. There is a free tier: Free for your first 100 subscribers.

Who it is not for
Automations and segmentation cost extra
What this is based on
Based on pricing read from Buttondown's own page on 2026-08-28, and what the product says it does. No reviews yet, so no score.

Pricing

PlanMonthlyAnnual /moWhat you get
FreeFreeSame as monthlyUp to 100 subscribers, markdown editor, hosted archive, custom domain
Usage-based (100+ subscribers)Not publishedSame as monthlySliding scale by subscriber count; add-ons $9-$79/mo each (automations, tagging, teams)

Buttondown price history

Every price change

Buttondown's pricing has not moved since we started tracking it on 2026-08-27. We read it off Buttondown's own pricing page on every update, and this section fills in when something changes.

Read from Buttondown's own pricing page, dated on the day we read it. We only claim a change happened between two dates we actually looked, never on a date we did not.

Free tier

Yes, first 100 subs

Automations

Add-on, $29/mo

Transactional email

No

Landing pages

Hosted archive only

Paid newsletters

Add-on, $9/mo

API/dev friendly

Yes, full API

Review Buttondown

All Buttondown reviews

Reviews of Buttondown

We do not publish a score until 3 people have left one, because an average of one review is not a rating. It takes about a minute: verify an email so we know you are a person, pick a score, and say what it is actually like to use.

No password, no newsletter, one review per person per tool.

Loading reviews…

Alternatives

Plunk

Email Marketing

Open-source email platform, marketing and transactional

Best for developers wanting open-source, self-hostable email

FreeFree to try
Pricing & reviewsVisit
Bento

Email Marketing

Email marketing, automation and transactional, unified

Best for ecommerce and saas founders wanting automation

Free, then $5/moFree to try
Pricing & reviewsVisit
Brevo (formerly Sendinblue)

Email Marketing

Email, SMS and CRM priced by volume

Best for large lists needing volume-based pricing

Free, then $8.08/moFree to try
Pricing & reviewsVisit

More on Buttondown

The rest of the stack

Buttondown does one job. These are the jobs that usually come next, and what we would look at for each.

Website Building

Compare all

A list needs somewhere for people to join it.

Data Analytics

Compare all

Open rates tell you very little. These tie the send to what happened afterwards.

Chosen by what job comes next, not by any integration between them: we have not verified that these products talk to each other, so we are not going to imply it. A slot in this block is not for sale and paid placement is excluded from it outright, but some of these links do earn us a commission and the ones that do say so above.

Do you make Buttondown?

Claim the listing, reply to reviews, and put your rating on your own site with a badge that keeps itself up to date.

Sources