A Buttondown review

I have used Buttondown for almost a year now for All About Berlin’s newsletter. I could not find reviews for Buttondown when signing up for the service, so here is mine.

Rough start

The first few days with Buttondown were disappointing. I encountered one bug after another, and often had to get their customer support involved. When I blew past the free plan’s 100-subscriber limit, Buttondown failed to deliver a scheduled email and stopped sending activation emails to new subscribers.

When I upgraded the plan, nothing happened. The newsletter was not delivered, and dozens of users never got the activation email. I had to fix this manually with help from their customer support.

Nonetheless, I decided to stay with them. Their support was very helpful, but the poor quality control made me feel like I was supporting an underdog, even though I am paying for a finished product.

I asked a friend who runs a bigger newsletter, and he had just moved away from Buttondown after experiencing one issue after another. He told me that he felt like their unpaid product owner.

More problems still

Around a year later, I have reached my 1,000 subscriber limit. There was no email; I learned about it from an API error message.

While logged in, I looked at the recent API requests, and saw that Buttondown’s firewall rejected half a dozen legitimate subscribers in the last month alone. I had to verify and add each of them manually.

Today, after sending my September newsletter, Buttondown has disabled my account without any clarification.

Conclusion

I hoped that Buttondown would make it easy to email about a thousand people once per month. It does not do that reliably. I wanted a service that I could set and forget, but every time I take my eyes off of it, something goes wrong.

Again, their support is great, but I wish I did not have to contact it so often.

I do not recommend Buttondown.