GPT on Question 32, Sep 29

Best default: MailerLite

For a solo, bootstrapped US founder, MailerLite usually offers the best balance of:

• •Affordable pricing as your list grows
• •Simple newsletter and automation tools
• •Landing pages and forms
• •Reasonable segmentation
• •Less complexity than enterprise-focused platforms

Choose something else if:

• •You’re a creator selling courses or memberships: Kit
  Strong creator automations and integrations, but often pricier.

• •Your business is primarily a newsletter/media publication: beehiiv
  Better publishing, referral, and monetization features.

• •You run a SaaS and need behavioral lifecycle emails: Loops or Customer.io
  Loops is simpler; Customer.io is more powerful and complex.

• •You want an ultra-simple written newsletter: Buttondown
  Minimal, pleasant, and founder-friendly.

• •You need both marketing and transactional email on a budget: Brevo
  Useful if you also need SMTP, though its interface can feel less polished.

My practical recommendation

Start with MailerLite unless your business clearly fits one of the categories above. Don’t over-optimize early—the important things are:

• 1.Easy subscriber export
• 2.Forms and basic automations
• 3.Domain authentication: SPF, DKIM, and DMARC
• 4.Clear unsubscribe handling and CAN-SPAM compliance
• 5.Pricing that remains acceptable at your expected list size

If you send password resets, receipts, or account notifications, keep those separate from marketing email using something like Postmark, Resend, or Amazon SES. This protects critical transactional-email deliverability.

I’d generally avoid starting with Mailchimp unless a specific integration requires it; it tends to become expensive and cumbersome as your list and automation needs grow.