Claude on Question 32, Sep 16

The right answer hinges on what kind of email you're mostly sending, so here's how I'd break it down:

If you're building an audience/newsletter alongside a product
[Kit](https://kit.com) (formerly ConvertKit) is my default suggestion. Its free tier has historically gone up to ~10,000 subscribers, the automation builder is good enough for anything a solo founder needs, and deliverability is solid. Its recommendation network also helps with growth.

MailerLite is the other strong pick here — cheaper than Kit at paid tiers, clean interface, includes landing pages and forms. Slightly less polished automation, but great value.

If the newsletter is the business
beehiiv. It's built around growth and monetization — referral programs, a paid ads marketplace, native subscriptions. Substack is friction-free but takes 10% of paid revenue and you don't really own the relationship or the design. Ghost is the self-hosted-ish option if you want to own your stack and pay no revenue cut.

If you're a SaaS and need lifecycle + transactional email
Loops is popular with indie SaaS founders right now — event-triggered emails, simple pricing, handles both marketing and product email in one place. Resend is the developer-first option (great API, React Email, now does broadcasts too). Either beats bolting a marketing tool onto a product that needs password resets and receipts.

If you're ecommerce
Klaviyo, reluctantly. It's expensive but the Shopify integration and revenue attribution genuinely pay for themselves. Omnisend is the budget alternative.

A few practical notes

Skip Mailchimp. It was the obvious default a decade ago; pricing and support both got worse after the Intuit acquisition.

Watch pricing models, not just prices. Contact-based pricing (most tools) punishes you for having a big list you rarely email. Brevo charges by sends instead, which is much better if you have 20k subscribers and email monthly.

Set up SPF, DKIM, and DMARC on a subdomain (like mail.yourdomain.com) before your first send. Google and Yahoo tightened bulk sender requirements in 2024 — DMARC and one-click unsubscribe are effectively mandatory now, and getting this wrong early hurts your domain reputation in ways that are annoying to undo. Also, CAN-SPAM requires a physical mailing address in your footer; a PO box or virtual mailbox is fine.

Don't agonize over this. Migration is a half-day of annoyance, not a catastrophe. The only genuinely costly mistake is building deep automation in an expensive tool before you know if the channel works.

Happy to get more specific if you tell me what you're selling and roughly how big your list is.