How we review newsletter and email platforms

Short version

• Prices and features come from each vendor’s own pricing page, dated and linked. Our current check date is 23 Oct 2026.
• Hands-on use: Lewis has used beehiiv, Substack and Mailchimp himself, and those pages say so. He hasn’t used Kit, MailerLite, AWeber or Ghost, and those reviews say they’re not hands-on tested. Using a platform isn’t the same as a structured test, so we don’t publish scores.
• Experience: the advice on lists, sequences, segments, pruning, open rates and paid growth comes from Lewis’s experience of growing Anywhere Income to 12,000 subscribers, roughly 60% through paid ads and 40% organically (mostly Twitter).
• No star ratings. We haven’t run a scoring test, so we don’t invent one.
• Money: we may earn commission on some links; see the disclosure.

Where the facts come from

1. Vendor pricing and feature pages. For every platform we open the official pricing page, copy the plan names, prices, limits and features, and record the date. Each figure appears with a link to its source on the pricing tracker and in the facts box on each review.
2. Vendor affiliate and programme pages, where we mention commission terms internally, not on public pages.
3. Public guidance where we make a general claim about email, for example Google’s published sender guidelines.
4. Experience. The author’s own experience, which we describe narrowly and truthfully: he grew a newsletter (Anywhere Income) to 12,000 subscribers using paid ads and social media, attended Matt McGarry’s newsletter bootcamp, has used beehiiv, Substack and Mailchimp, and has views on pruning lists, open rates, sequences, segments and ad networks.

What we have and haven’t done

We’ll update this table as that changes. If we later test a platform hands-on, the review will say exactly what we did.

Rules we follow

• Every review lists cons and who should skip it. A review with no downsides isn’t useful.
• We recommend different tools for different situations, including ones that pay us nothing.
• No invented numbers. If we don’t have a figure, we say we don’t.
• We date everything. The “last checked” date at the top of each page is the date the figures on it were last compared with the vendors’ pages.
• We separate sourced facts from opinion. Facts link to a source; opinion is labelled as experience.
• We link to vendors through /go/ links marked as sponsored where relevant, so you can see which links may earn us money.

How we keep pages current

We plan to re-check the vendors’ pricing pages monthly and whenever a vendor announces a change. When we do, we update the figures, the date and the pricing tracker’s change log. Where a page’s “last checked” date looks old, assume the figures may have moved and check the vendor’s page.

Corrections

When we find an error, or a vendor changes a price or plan, we check it against the vendor’s own page and fix it. For material errors we note the correction on the page and, for prices, in the pricing tracker change log.

Related

Read about Lewis, the affiliate disclosure, the pricing tracker and our best newsletter platforms page to see the method applied. The pruning and open rates guide shows the kind of experience-based advice we mean.