Write more (notes)

The most visible, broadly applicable, and generally useful additions to Buttondown this month are freeform Notes fields added to subscriber profiles, tag pages, and RSS feed pages. Behold! Write anything you might want to reference or remember in the future:

Even better, anything you type in a notes field will show up in a search, from anywhere inside your account. And, if you know even a little about how we do things, it should come as no surprise that you can add notes via the API. 

Read the changelog entry for more info and let us know if there are any other objects we should add notes to!

Goodbye Stripe Checkouts. Hello Stripe Checkouts.

Nothing is changing for your checkout flow right now. Soon, however, Buttondown will be rolling out customizable checkout flows. You’ll be able to customize colors, branding, and messaging so everything feels like it came from you, not from a template.

Your existing Stripe payment links will continue to work (forever!). We just aren’t surfacing them to new subscribers any more. Because they’ll see something better. Keep an eye on the changelog for more updates.

From the blog

You wouldn’t expect a band, founded 60 years ago, to have the advice your email newsletter needs in 2025. And yet, The Grateful Dead’s phenomenal success—for all of the people who try to mine their wisdom for marketing—had as much to do with their tech-savvy fans as it did with the newsletters that got them to organize.

If The Grateful Dead is at least partially a story of right-place-right-time, the story of RSS is one of overcoming the odds. Because despite Microsoft developing and pushing its own syndication protocol, the one that’s still in use 30 years later was built by a ragtag group of volunteer developers who struggled to agree on anything.

Other stuff

• We rolled out a new onboarding process and wrote about why we changed it as well as what we’ve learned so far.

• It was a big month for our war on spam, with new IP auditing and exemptions for the Firewall, CAPTCHAs for subscribe forms, suppressed email notifications, and categories of undeliverable emails.

• You can now customize the email someone receives when their gift subscription runs out. 

• Satisfying our own curiosity, we dove into the history of email newsletters.

• And, finally, there was an update to let you track when paid subscribers churn and another to send emails based on subscriber lifecycle dates.