April updates

Howdy, friends! I'm writing this belated update having just arrived back in Seattle from a week of leisure and wine in Paris. Apologies for the sluggishness in responding to emails and DMs; rest assured, I'll be spending the next few days getting back to folks.

What’s new

March was a big month for Buttondown.

I shipped three things that have folks have been pining for for months:

1. You can now create and send emails through Buttondown’s API.
2. Buttondown now has a Zapier integration, meaning that you can now do things like fire webhook events in response to new subscribers or send out emails in response to RSS items.
3. Paid subscriptions are now in public beta. (I’ve onboarded three folks and am in the process of onboarding three more; if you want in, just email me!)

I cannot be more excited about all of these new ships. There’s a lot of work to be done still (especially on that last piece: paid subscriptions are barebone, and I need to flesh out analytics and reporting) but this represents the culmination of a lot of work and I am thrilled to have it across the line.

What’s next

April is going to be a languid month, filled with paying down some technical debt, solving myriad bugs, and getting my ducks in a row. I’m not promising anything too huge, but some small stuff you may enjoy:

1. More work on enabling multiple newsletters for a given account.
2. Supporting Firefox/Safari’s reading mode on archive pages.
3. Nicer slug URLs for archived emails.
4. Exposing subscriber events through the API.
5. Seriously, lots of bug fixes.

Running costs

I've updated Buttondown's running costs for April. Notable are the increased Clearbit costs and the ever-rising costs of Mailgun's email validation; if I have time, I'm going to work on ameliorating both.

Some other things you might find interesting.

I’ve been writing about Buttondown a fair bit on my personal blog:

1. Buttondown's anti-roadmap
2. Buttondown's solvable problems.