I just signed up for Buttondown after researching and comparing a dozen other newsletter platforms.<p>I told our CEO that Buttondown is exactly the kind of scrappy startup we'd want representing our own startup.<p>If it's helpful for the HackerNews community, I've made my comparison spreadsheet free to view:
<a href="https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1P9FyAYDdFZvTzmXVQi8A-pfKSa7gPG1c2v0L3-GH8uU/edit?usp=sharing" rel="nofollow">https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1P9FyAYDdFZvTzmXVQi8A...</a><p>(I'm not an employee and have no financial incentive, I'm just a fan.)
> people stop referring to Buttondown as "Buttondown Email", a personal pet peeve of mine<p>This is funny because I only remember Buttondown Email because I love the name and domain. I am either going to keep remembering it as Buttondown Email or eventually forget it as Generic Noun Unrelated To Product 9000
Author here! Happy to answer any questions folks have.<p>(I would also be remiss if I didn't say that I am grateful to HN for introducing me to what was called microISVs a decade ago, "indie hacking" five years ago, and now I suppose is mostly called "building in public" / "lifestyle businesses". I was inspired to start Buttondown in no small part due to reading about Candy Japan, Appointment Reminder, et al, and learning that there was a different yet equally valid path for growing a SaaS)
> We ended up using hurl as a test harness around HAProxy, something we probably should have done three years ago.<p>As maintainer of Hurl [1], this makes me happy!<p>[1]: <a href="https://hurl.dev" rel="nofollow">https://hurl.dev</a>
So, switching the domain to buttondown.com brought an uptick of traffic quickly.<p>People apparently still hear a word, type it, and press Ctrl+Enter, or a mobile equivalent.<p>Whoever has been parking the domain likely had made a wise investment, and now received $85k for it. Not millions, but still a new car.
For context, Buttondown is like Mailchimp but stripped down to only the essentials. It is simple, has everything I need, but not 1 million things I don't need. I love it.
A minor point to feed back: for me, <a href="https://www.buttondown.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.buttondown.com/</a> fails to load, while <a href="https://buttondown.com/" rel="nofollow">https://buttondown.com/</a> works.
The pricing page (in the FAQ section) has a "c..e@buttondown.email" address, so the grep must not have been complete :-)<p>(I've migrated a domain from .io to .com, I can relate)<p>I'm a possible customer, so I looked at the service and its pricing page and… I'm not sure if this is a service for me. I send both transactional and non-transactional E-mail, but I don't need "list management", just E-mail processing. Buttondown would be $29/month + $50/month for whitelabeling, while Postmark would be $15/month. Am I missing something?
I remember when Teamwork's founder bought a round of drinks for everyone at a local tech meetup to celebrate acquiring the domain (teamwork.com).<p>I think they paid something like half a million quid for it? It was an absolutely eye watering amount to me at the time (and I think them, in fairness), but past a certain size having your .com was and probably still is big for trust.<p>Which is to say, congratulations! You must be delighted.
Buttondown is intended for marketing emails, like Mailchimp, right? It's not necessarily for business email like O365, Google Apps, Fastmail, etc?
<a href="https://buttondown.com/" rel="nofollow">https://buttondown.com/</a><p>Clickable link, since the blog didn’t have it.
Last time I tried to buy my .com, the seller countered at $500k. No thanks. Not convinced it'll ever be break-even at that ridiculous price. Not sure I'd even pay $85k. The return on that investment just seems... low.
Oh so nice those fancy tlds and domain names. I have been too "clever" about 2 domains in my life already:<p>First is my private email which has only 4 letters and our national .nl tld. I always have to spell out the domain because it is not really a word, and it sometimes confuses Americans (non-techies) that there is no .com.<p>The second domain is my business domain which has .bio as tld, and now I often see people waiting for more when I say my address, like: "Hi, my address is blabla.bio", "... and?" "No, that is it, .bio is the end."<p>So I guess "normal" .com is just the way to go ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ (although in both cases that was just too expensive for me and I like short domains a lot myself, I once met someone who had (pattern) xx@yy.dk, apparently the whole company did, I kneeled.)
As someone who has never heard of Buttondown before this, I do wonder if this is a strong enough brand name to be worth the expensive domain.<p>It’s not like hey.com or something, it’s kind of a clunky name in the first place.<p>I would have considered renaming the company and picking up a cheaper domain in the process.
Love buttondown. Have been using it for 3-4 months now and it’s everything I need without all the bullshit. Also thanks for your prompt problem solving whenever I find a bug!
imma be honest, if i get a email that comes from a buttondown.com server, for something i have never signed up for, im gonna mark as spam... email is hard, and it seams every time a new sender service pops up, It seems to get a lot of bad actors.<p>Your homepage says "and our spam protection is best-in-class." is that for your client inbox, or mine?
<p><pre><code> We bought the dot-com-domain and managed not to shit ourselves in the process.
</code></pre>
Is this company HN sponsored? Why do these marketing pieces reach the frontpage?