Buttondown

Buttondown is a hosted newsletter and email platform made by Buttondown, LLC, whose terms and privacy policy give a postal address in Richmond, Virginia, in the US.¹² The company says it has been fully remote since its founding in 2017, and describes itself as a small team of engineers, writers and designers that is profitable and self-funded.³ Its about page adds that it is funded by its customers rather than by investors or venture capital, and that all tracking is opt-in.⁴ For a one-person company, Buttondown is a way to write a newsletter in a rich-text or Markdown editor, send it from the company's own domain and keep a hosted archive of past issues.³

On its pricing page, Buttondown costs nothing for the first 100 subscribers; a list of up to 1,000 costs $9 a month on monthly billing or $90 a year on the Basic plan. It charges for active subscribers rather than all contacts, and its prices assume at most one email a day to the whole list, with heavier senders asked to get in touch about usage-based pricing.³ At the 1,000-subscriber level the page lists free migration by Buttondown among what the price includes, so moving a list from another tool is done for you; automations are a separate add-on.³ That $9 price is the lowest of 13 platforms in OneManOnly's ranking Cheapest Paid Email Platform at 1,000 Subscribers, and its 100-subscriber free tier appears in How Email Platforms’ Free Tiers Changed in 2025–26, where no dated change to Buttondown's free plan was found on the pages opened. Buttondown's about page says it avoids very generous free plans so that its pricing stays sustainable over the long term (vendor-stated).⁴