What is beehiiv?
beehiiv is an all-in-one platform for newsletters. It’s a creator-friendly newsletter platform that makes it easy to design, write, send, promote, monetize, and track the ROI of your newsletter.
Created by former employees at the famous newsletter company Morning Brew, beehiiv aims to help creators launch and monetize their own newsletter — taking lots of growth principles from taking Morning Brew to over 4M subscribers.
In this article, I’m going to explain my personal experience with beehiiv, the things I love (and hate) about it, all of it’s features, and why I decided to finally go with it as my newsletter platform of choice.
My personal experience with beehiiv
A few months ago, I accidentally stumbled across beehiiv. The funny story is that I’ve been on the lookout for a modern newsletter platform for quite some time now. I’ve procrastinated hard when it came to finally launching my newsletter.
First, I tried Mailchimp. Then, a few other indie platforms. Then, Substack. And finally, I ended up using beehiiv.
I’m sure many newsletter creators look up to popular newsletters with millions of subscribers — I know I do. The Morning Brew newsletter is one I looked up to a lot. They have great content, tons of subscribers, and a clever referral program that allows them to get even more subscribers.
So, I went on a hunt to figure out how these big newsletters set up their logistics. What platform do they use? How do they track the ROI of their newsletters? How do they get more subscribers? How do they create a newsletter design that stays on-brand?
When I discovered beehiiv for the first time, it seemed to answer all of my questions. I thought to myself, “damn the people that built this tool really understand newsletter creation and growth.” I questioned who these creators of beehiiv were.
So I went to LinkedIn, and saw that the co-founders were some of the first marketing and growth employees at Morning Brew — my brain exploded.
I knew this was going to be a different newsletter platform. One that’s focused on creator growth.
Because, any creator knows, you need growth to be able to make a living off of a newsletter. And finding the right newsletter stack (that scales) often means using multiple different tools to help achieve one goal — one platform for your newsletter, one platform to monetize, and one platform to set up referrals. It can get expensive.
So when I found out beehiiv did all of these things in one platform, and it was free to start using, it was a no-brainer to give it a try.
Who is beehiiv for?
beehiiv is for the lean content creator that wants a platform that allows them to send custom newsletters with or without needing to have a website.
The most successful newsletters have the right tools to build and scale their newsletters. beehiiv aims at giving you those tools.
If you’re an independent writer, media company, startup, or content creator, you should seriously considering trying out beehiiv. It’s totally free to get started and you only pay when you reach over 2,500 subscribers on your list.
If you actually end up having to pay for beehiiv it’s probably a good sign that people love reading your stuff.
Curious about trying beehiiv but want a good deal?
Register for a 30-day free trial and then use my code BEEHIIV2025 to get 20% off your first 3 months!
beehiiv vs Substack
You might be asking, “isn’t there already a platform for writers called Substack?”
Yes, yes there is. Substack is a great platform used by thousands of independent writers. With Substack you get your own website and use the platform as your all-in-one solution for sending emails (while creating an archive of previous issues).
What sets beehiiv apart is it’s dedication to growth. beehiiv allows you do to all the things Substack can do, with the benefit of better analytics, more design flexibilty, and a referral program to encourage your existing subscribers to get the word out.
beehiiv also gives you a website similar to Substack. But, if you have your own website already, you can also use beehiiv’s sign-up embeds (that’s what I use) to send your website subscribers straight to your beehiiv email list. On the same token, you can integrate beehiiv with a tool like Revue to allow people to subscribe to your newsletter directly from Twitter.
This gives you the flexibility to leverage different marketing channels to get your newsletter out into the world, making beehiiv a great Substack alternative.
beehiiv pricing plans
beehiiv offers four different pricing plans. You can check them out below.
The (free) Launch plan gives you everything you need to get started and grow your newsletter (up to 2,500 subscribers).
The Scale plan ($49/month) gives you everything in the Launch plan with the addition the ad network, referral program, custom domain, polls, and access to premium subscriptions. This is the plan I am on.
The Max plan ($109/month) gives you everything in the Grow plan with addition of priority support and removing the beehiiv branding.
All of these plans are quite generous in my opinion.
For example, if you have 100,000 subscribers you will pay around $329 per month. As opposed to some competitors, like Kit (formerly ConvertKit), that would charge $679 per month for the same amount — making beehiiv a great Kit alternative for many users.
I’m not sure how the unit economics work on this, but beehiiv is definitely cheaper (at the moment) than what it can be.
Conclusion
Overall, beehiiv is a great solution for anyone looking to dive into the world of email marketing and newsletters.
The functionality of this newsletter platform far outweighs many that are currently on the market. And with a generous free plan, you really have nothing to lose for trying it.
The paid plans are also fairly cheap for what they are. Paying only $329/month to have 100,000 subscribers on your list is unheard of. If you were to have a newsletter with 100k subscribers, and all of these features beehiiv has, it could cost you well into the thousands per month.
Anyways, I don’t write review posts often. I only do when I actually use the tool myself and would recommend it to a friend.
I hope you found some clarity on whether or not beehiiv is a good platform for you.
