So — you're looking for a newsletter solution and you're weighing both Curated and Buttondown.
We try pretty hard not to be biased with these writeups — there are a lot of great products out there, and we're not going to pretend that Buttondown is the best fit for every use case.
Let's start with the points in Curated's favor:
- It's cheaper to get started. Buttondown's free plan only lets you collect a hundred subscribers, while Curated's free plan lets you collect up to 1500.
- Curated has built-in support for sponsorship management. So does Buttondown: sponsorships are available on the Standard plan and above, alongside paid subscriptions through Stripe.
If you really need sponsorship management taken care of for you, or if you're extremely price-sensitive — Curated may be the right choice for you.
However! (There's always a however, isn't there?) There are a couple big red flags with Curated:
- While Buttondown's free plan is less generous than Curated, almost every other price point is cheaper. Two thousand subscribers will cost you $39 on Curated compared to $29 on Buttondown; five thousand subscribers will cost you $129 on Curated compared to $29 on Buttondown.
- Buttondown is a richer, more popular product. It's got integrations with all of your favorite apps — plus RSS and API support — to make it easy for you to curate an editorial newsletter of your dreams.