Last year, Tinyletter, a minimalistic newsletter platform for tiny communities, got shut down by its parent company Mailchimp. My community, Phage Directory, runs a crowdsourced phage therapy service called Phage Alerts, which connects physicians and patients with labs with phages for compassionate use.

Tinyletter was perfect as a newsletter tool: it was quick to author posts, supported subscribe/unsubscribe, post previews, and html emails, and it was really fast. The tool was also barebones — it didn’t push email marketing like Mailchimp, didn’t push community like Substack, and didn’t push content creation like Beehiiv. And it was free! But good things don’t last forever.

For Phage Directory, we used to use Mailgun for mail routing through Cloudflare, but currently uses Fastmail for regular email, Beehiiv for Phage Alerts, and Mailgun for one-off transactional emails.

Below is a list of the “best” newsletter / transactional email services I’ve been able to find. They all have their pros/cons. I’m still on the hunt for a service with best price + features. Loops is close, but really expensive for our free, no-revenue service.

Mailchimp

Mailchimp is an email marketing tool. We use Mailchimp for our main Phage Directory newsletter, but it’s gone downhill since the acquisition. I like that they support custom html templates, and have good analytics and subscription management. They also have a super nice API! The downside is that if you push past their free tier it gets very expensive — for use it’d cost $60/mo.

Sendgrid

Like Mailchimp, Sendgrid is for marketing. Their free tier is very limiting (100 emails a day) so this option would cost us $20/mo to send an alert out a couple of times a month. But they do support html templates and have a nice API. I’m not sure if they do subscription management though.

Beehiiv

Beehiiv is for newsletters and content creation. This is what Phage Alerts uses now, but it’s far from ideal. It’s free, but they don’t support html emails, their templates don’t allow for much customization and no API. But they do have a built-in subscription management and decent analytics. If we get more than 2500 subscribers, this would cost $60/mo.

Postmark

Postmark is mostly for transactional emails, which means they don’t support subscription management, which is their biggest downside. They do support html emails and have an extensive API, but I wish they had some of the templating and subscription features that beehiiv and Mailchimp had. This would also cost us $15/mo.

Mailgun

This is another transactional email tool similar to Postmark. We used to use Mailgun to route our regular Phage Directory emails, before we switched to Fastmail. I still use Mailgun for blasting emails for events. I like their pricing because they have a decent API and I’m grandfathered into their Pay-as-you-go pricing, but it looks like they’re now at $15/mo. Their API is easy to use, and you can send anything through them. Seems like they even support unsubscribe…!

Loops

Loops attempts to combine transactional and marketing into a single service, which makes sense because in the end it’s just email. They have a good API, have subscription management, but they don’t support html emails (they have this awkward custom templates thing), but I see that they’ve expanded to MJML support. Out of all the choices, this seems like the most modern one and easiest to use option, but their pricing is kind of weird. It seems like they charge for # of “subscribers,” but not all contacts you email need to count towards a subscriber. Not sure, but this would probably cost $50/mo.