Note that some links may be affiliate links, and kudos to Cushion for the inspiration behind this page. (All costs are monthly; I list one-time purchases as having an ongoing cost of "$0".)
(Interested in the open source software we use and maintain? Check out the open-source software page.)
Service | Genre | Since | Ended | Monthly cost |
---|---|---|---|---|
Postmark | Genre Infrastructure | Started 2018 | Ended 0 | $1,450.00 |
Stripe | Genre Infrastructure | Started 2017 | Ended 0 | $1,100.00 |
Heroku Dynos | Genre Infrastructure | Started 2017 | Ended 0 | $450.00 |
Amazon Relational Database Service | Genre Infrastructure | Started 2020 | Ended 0 | $500.00 |
Depot | Genre Infrastructure | Started 2024 | Ended 0 | $200.00 |
Buttondown | Genre Marketing | Started 2017 | Ended 0 | $139.00 |
Vercel | Genre Infrastructure | Started 2022 | Ended 0 | $250.00 |
Sentry | Genre Infrastructure | Started 2018 | Ended 0 | $115.00 |
DigitalOcean | Genre Infrastructure | Started 2024 | Ended 0 | $80.00 |
Helpscout | Genre Marketing | Started 2022 | Ended 0 | $100.00 |
Notion | Genre Productivity | Started 2018 | Ended 0 | $150.00 |
Redis Enterprise Cloud | Genre Infrastructure | Started 2023 | Ended 0 | $100.00 |
Twitter API | Genre Miscellany | Started 2020 | Ended 0 | $100.00 |
Metabase | Genre Productivity | Started 2024 | Ended 0 | $90.00 |
Better Stack | Genre Operations | Started 2022 | Ended 0 | $80.00 |
Amazon Simple Storage Service | Genre Infrastructure | Started 2017 | Ended 0 | $64.00 |
Slack | Genre Productivity | Started 2017 | Ended 0 | $50.00 |
Fathom | Genre Infrastructure | Started 2020 | Ended 0 | $45.00 |
Google Suite | Genre Infrastructure | Started 2018 | Ended 0 | $65.00 |
Quickbooks | Genre Finance | Started 2022 | Ended 0 | $30.00 |
Zapier | Genre Productivity | Started 2022 | Ended 0 | $30.00 |
AHrefs | Genre Marketing | Started 2021 | Ended 0 | $29.00 |
Iframely | Genre Data | Started 2022 | Ended 0 | $29.00 |
Cleantalk | Genre Data | Started 2017 | Ended 0 | $28.00 |
Pagerduty | Genre Infrastructure | Started 2020 | Ended 0 | $25.00 |
1Password | Genre Productivity | Started 2019 | Ended 0 | $20.00 |
Mailgun | Genre Infrastructure | Started 2017 | Ended 0 | $20.00 |
OpenAI | Genre Infrastructure | Started 2023 | Ended 0 | $20.00 |
Savvycal | Genre Operations | Started 2022 | Ended 0 | $20.00 |
Twitter Blue | Genre Marketing | Started 2022 | Ended 0 | $16.00 |
Cloudflare | Genre Infrastructure | Started 2023 | Ended 0 | $15.00 |
Dmarc Digests | Genre Operations | Started 2022 | Ended 0 | $14.00 |
Supermaven | Genre Productivity | Started 2024 | Ended 0 | $10.00 |
Resend | Genre Infrastructure | Started 2024 | Ended 0 | $10.00 |
Valtown | Genre Infrastructure | Started 2023 | Ended 0 | $10.00 |
DNSimple | Genre Infrastructure | Started 2017 | Ended 0 | $39.00 |
icon.horse | Genre Data | Started 2023 | Ended 0 | $9.00 |
Loom | Genre Productivity | Started 2023 | Ended 0 | $9.00 |
Audiogest | Genre Productivity | Started 2024 | Ended 0 | $8.00 |
Discord | Genre Marketing | Started 2023 | Ended 0 | — |
F5Bot | Genre Marketing | Started 2022 | Ended 0 | — |
Fivetran | Genre Infrastructure | Started 2024 | Ended 0 | — |
GitHub | Genre Infrastructure | Started 2017 | Ended 0 | — |
GitHub Actions | Genre Infrastructure | Started 2020 | Ended 0 | — |
GitHub Issues | Genre Productivity | Started 2017 | Ended 0 | — |
Google Web Risk API | Genre Data | Started 2023 | Ended 0 | — |
Kolo | Genre Productivity | Started 2024 | Ended 0 | — |
Mercury | Genre Finance | Started 2024 | Ended 0 | — |
Mimestream | Genre Productivity | Started 2023 | Ended 0 | — |
Mono Lisa | Genre Miscellaneous | Started 2021 | Ended 0 | — |
PayPal | Genre Operations | Started 2023 | Ended 0 | — |
Postico | Genre Productivity | Started 2018 | Ended 0 | — |
Things | Genre Productivity | Started 2018 | Ended 0 | — |
Trotto | Genre Productivity | Started 2024 | Ended 0 | — |
VS Code | Genre Productivity | Started 2021 | Ended 0 | — |
Amazon Simple Email Service | Genre Infrastructure | Started 2021 | Ended 2023 | — |
Bear | Genre Productivity | Started 2023 | Ended 2023 | — |
Calibre | Genre Miscellaneous | Started 2023 | Ended 2023 | — |
CircleCI | Genre Infrastructure | Started 2017 | Ended 2020 | — |
DNSHelper | Genre Miscellaneous | Started 2022 | Ended 2024 | — |
Feedbin | Genre Productivity | Started 2020 | Ended 2024 | — |
FullContact | Genre Data | Started 2017 | Ended 2019 | — |
Github Copilot | Genre Productivity | Started 2022 | Ended 2024 | — |
Golinks | Genre Productivity | Started 2022 | Ended 2024 | — |
Heroku Postgres | Genre Infrastructure | Started 2017 | Ended 2020 | — |
Heroku Redis | Genre Infrastructure | Started 2018 | Ended 2023 | — |
imgix | Genre Infrastructure | Started 2023 | Ended 2023 | — |
Ivory | Genre Marketing | Started 2023 | Ended 2023 | — |
Jasper | Genre Marketing | Started 2023 | Ended 2023 | — |
PhysicalAddress | Genre Miscellaneous | Started 2018 | Ended 2022 | — |
Pika | Genre Design | Started 2024 | Ended 2024 | — |
PopSQL | Genre Productivity | Started 2021 | Ended 2024 | — |
Screen Studio | Genre Productivity | Started 2023 | Ended 2024 | — |
Ship | Genre Productivity | Started 2018 | Ended 2020 | — |
Sketch | Genre Design | Started 2019 | Ended 2023 | — |
Statuspage | Genre Operations | Started 2019 | Ended 2024 | — |
Texts | Genre Productivity | Started 2021 | Ended 2024 | — |
Typefully | Genre Marketing | Started 2022 | Ended 2023 | — |
Tuple | Genre Productivity | Started 2024 | Ended 0 | $60.00 |
The most important resource I have is my energy, and being able to trade X dollars (where X is any number less than a hundred) for even trivial amounts of energy is an absolute no-brainer.
When I launched Buttondown, AWS Simple Email Service was notoriously low-quality and Postmark did not support broadcast emails. Mailgun was the choice I went with, and there are still many customers using Mailgun’s rails who have custom domain records set up that I don’t have the heart (or incentive) to migrate.
I like having redundancy — if one provider were to go down or drastically change rates it would be trivial for me to migrate — but if I were starting Buttondown from scratch I would likely just have everything run through Postmark.
Some specific choices I made to roll my own: