Claude on Question 32, Sep 22

Short answer: for most solo bootstrapped founders, MailerLite or Kit (formerly ConvertKit) if you're doing audience/newsletter work, and Loops or Resend if you're emailing users of a product. But the right pick depends a lot on what you're actually sending, so here's the breakdown.

If you're building an audience (newsletter, content, lead gen)

• •MailerLite — best value overall. Free to 1,000 subscribers, then roughly $10–25/mo in the early tiers. Landing pages, forms, decent automations, clean interface. Nothing flashy, but it does the job and won't surprise you on price.
• •Kit — free up to 10,000 subscribers, which is unusually generous. Strongest automation logic of the cheap options, plus a creator recommendation network that can drive real signups. Gets pricey after you cross the free tier.
• •Beehiiv — built for newsletters specifically. Good growth tooling, a paid recommendations marketplace, and an ad network if you ever want to monetize with sponsorships. Free to 2,500 subs.
• •Buttondown — if you want something minimal and cheap, written by an indie dev, markdown-based. Great if you just want to write and send.

If you're emailing users of a product (SaaS)

This is a different problem: you need transactional email (password resets, receipts) and lifecycle email (onboarding sequences, trial nudges), ideally from one place.

• •Loops — purpose-built for this, popular with indie SaaS founders, handles both transactional and campaign email with event-triggered flows. Simple pricing.
• •Resend — developer-first, excellent API and DX, React Email for templating. Leans transactional but has broadcasts now. Good if you'd rather write code than click through a UI.
• •Postmark — the reliability pick for pure transactional. Excellent deliverability and reputation discipline. Less useful for marketing sequences.
• •Customer.io — much more powerful behavioral segmentation, but likely overkill and over-budget until you have meaningful revenue.

If you're selling physical products

Klaviyo is the default if you're on Shopify — expensive, but the ecommerce attribution and flows usually pay for themselves once you have order volume. Omnisend is the cheaper alternative worth testing first.

Two things worth knowing regardless

Watch the pricing model. Subscriber-based pricing (Kit, MailerLite) punishes large lists you email rarely. Send-based pricing (Resend, SES) punishes frequent sends to small lists. Pick the one that matches your pattern. Also check whether unsubscribed contacts still count toward your total — this is a classic way bills creep up.

Deliverability is mostly on you, not the platform. Set up your own sending domain with SPF, DKIM, and DMARC on day one. Warm up gradually rather than blasting a cold list. Prune non-openers periodically. A well-configured cheap platform beats a badly-configured expensive one.

I'd skip Mailchimp — it's gotten expensive relative to what it offers, and the early tiers are a poor deal for bootstrappers now. HubSpot is a trap at your stage.

One reassuring note: if you're only doing newsletters, switching later is easy — you export a CSV and import it. The lock-in comes from complex automations and product event integrations, so that's the case where it's worth thinking harder upfront.

If you tell me what you're building and whether you need transactional email, I can narrow this to one recommendation.