First off — credit where it's due. AWeber has been in the inbox since 1998, which is a genuinely remarkable run, and they have stayed in business by being legitimately good at the thing they set out to do: delivering autoresponders for small businesses and affiliate marketers. If you are running a sales funnel, or you have an established AWeber footprint that you understand intimately, I would not necessarily tell you to switch.
But almost every customer we hear from who is migrating off AWeber tells us some version of the same story: the tool was built for a different kind of user — usually a different era of user — and the gravitational pull of two-plus decades of feature accretion has made it less and less suited to what a writer or a publisher actually wants to do, which is sit down, write a thing, and send it to people.
AWeber's interface still reflects its origins. Nested wizards, modal-heavy workflows, a drag-and-drop builder that produces serviceable-but-unmistakably-2014 templates. The features you'd expect from a modern newsletter tool — link-level analytics, behavioral automations, advanced segmentation, removing the AWeber brand from your footer — sit behind upgrade prompts on the Lite plan, which is the one most new accounts land on by default. None of this is a secret; AWeber is very upfront about what's in which plan. It's just that, after you've added everything up, you're paying a lot of money for a product that feels like the email-marketing equivalent of a flip phone with an extra row of buttons.
Buttondown is, deliberately, a different shape. We don't try to be all things to all people. We are a newsletter tool for writers, publishers, and small teams who want their software to disappear so they can focus on the actual words. That means a clean Markdown editor (with rich text if you'd rather), tags and segmentation on every paid plan, an archive that's a real public website, an API and webhooks on every paid plan, paid subscriptions, automations, and a team behind it that reads and responds to every support email personally. There is no "contact sales to enable this feature" inside Buttondown, because there is no sales team to contact.
The pricing comparison is, charitably, lopsided — and it gets more lopsided as your list grows, because AWeber's Plus plan (the one that includes the features most people would consider table stakes) escalates in a way Buttondown's doesn't:
That last bit — actively cared for — is the part I think about a lot when I look at competitors like AWeber. AWeber isn't going anywhere; they're a stable, profitable company with a long product roadmap. But "stable" and "actively cared for" are not the same thing, and the difference shows up in a hundred little places when you're using the tool every week.
If you do decide to move, the actual mechanics are straightforward: export your subscribers from AWeber as a CSV, import them into Buttondown, point your domain over, and you're done. If you have automations or tags worth carrying across, our concierge migration team will handle the heavy lifting — that service is free, and we'd rather do it ourselves than ask you to rebuild your list management from scratch.