Claude on Question 32, Sep 14

It depends a lot on what kind of email you're sending, since "email marketing" covers three pretty different jobs. Here's my honest read:

If you're building a newsletter or audience

• •Kit (formerly ConvertKit) is my default recommendation. Free up to ~10,000 subscribers, real visual automation, good landing pages, and it's built for solo creators rather than marketing teams.
• •MailerLite if you want the cheapest thing that's still good — the paid tiers undercut almost everyone.
• •Beehiiv if growth is the priority. Its referral program, recommendation network, and ad marketplace are genuinely differentiated if you're trying to scale a list fast.
• •Buttondown if you want something minimal, markdown-based, and run by an indie developer with similar incentives to yours.

If you're emailing users of a SaaS product (onboarding, lifecycle, transactional)

• •Loops is what a lot of indie SaaS founders have moved to. It handles both marketing campaigns and product-triggered emails, which means one tool instead of two.
• •Resend if you're comfortable in code and want great developer experience — React Email templates, clean API, and it now does broadcasts too.
• •Postmark if transactional deliverability is critical and you want the best in that specific niche.
• •Avoid Customer.io or Braze at your stage. Powerful, but you'll pay for capacity you can't use yet.

If you're ecommerce

• •Klaviyo, basically without argument. It's expensive, but the Shopify integration and revenue attribution usually pay for it. Omnisend is the cheaper alternative if Klaviyo's pricing stings.

A few things that matter more than the specific choice:

Watch the pricing model, not just the price. Contact-based pricing (Kit, Klaviyo, Mailchimp) punishes you for large or inactive lists. Send-based pricing (Brevo, Resend, SES) punishes you for emailing frequently. Pick the one that matches your pattern — a 50k list you email monthly and a 2k list you email daily want opposite models.

Set up your own sending domain with SPF, DKIM, and DMARC on day one, whatever you choose. This matters more for whether your email lands in the inbox than which platform you picked.

Confirm you can CSV-export your list and subscriber data anytime. This is why I'd hesitate on Substack if you're a business rather than a writer — the discovery network is real, but you're renting your brand and paying 10% of subscription revenue.

Don't over-deliberate. Migrating is annoying but survivable, and most of these have free tiers. Almost any of them beats spending a week comparing.

If you tell me what you're actually sending — newsletter, product emails, or store campaigns — and roughly how big your list is, I can narrow this to one recommendation. Also worth verifying current pricing tiers directly, since they shift around.