Stack

The tools, services, and open-source software that power Buttondown.

No team can do it alone. Here's every tool, service, and open-source project that powers Buttondown — and what we give back.

Open Source

Buttondown, like all software companies, sits on the shoulders of giants. We're committed to donating 10% of all profits to open source technologies that power our software, and we're proud members of FOSS Funders and signatories of the Open Source Pledge.

We also maintain a number of our own open-source packages, born out of needs we encountered building Buttondown and released for the community to use and contribute to.

Operations

$6,864 / yr

Productivity

$7,198 / yr

Marketing

$3,000 / yr

Data

$5,424 / yr

Google Web Risk API$0

Project Honeypot$0

Sender Score$0

Unsplash$0

Frontend

$1,000 / yr

vite-plugin-magical-svg$0

TypeScript

Python

django-typescript-routes★ 33

django-rq-cron★ 9

caltorss

Frequently asked questions

Why do you use so many services?

The most important resource I have is my energy, and being able to trade X dollars (where X is any number less than a hundred) for even trivial amounts of energy is an absolute no-brainer.

Why so many ESPs?

When I launched Buttondown, AWS Simple Email Service was notoriously low-quality and Postmark did not support broadcast emails. Mailgun was the choice I went with, and there are still many customers using Mailgun's rails who have custom domain records set up that I don't have the heart (or incentive) to migrate.

I like having redundancy — if one provider were to go down or drastically change rates it would be trivial for me to migrate — but if I were starting Buttondown from scratch I would likely just have everything run through Postmark.

Why don't you use something for X?

Some specific choices I made to roll my own:

Auth: I know it's increasingly trendy to outsource auth to a paid vendor but I'm not a fan of the lock-in and I like having full control over the experience.
Feature flags: rolled my own for performance reasons. Plan on open sourcing it at some point.

Addenda

In addition to the open-source commitments listed above, we donate $250/year to Adam Johnson, whose projects are too granular and numerous to list individually.
Stripe's cost is redacted because it scales with revenue and would be tantamount to disclosing our financials.

Changelog

Date	Change
2026-03-04	Downgraded Pulumi Cloud from paid to free tier.
2026-03-01	Churned from Better Stack's incident management to incident.io. Better Stack stays for observability.
2026-02-20	Stopped using Tailscale. Great service, we just didn't need it.
2026-02-16	Stopped using HEX for data notebooks.
2026-02-13	Added Obsidian for internal documentation.
2026-01-31	Stopped using DNSimple for DNS management.
2026-01-25	Stopped using ImprovMX for email forwarding.
2026-01-22	Migrated from Amazon RDS to Planetscale. Removed Iframely and Granola.
2025-12-26	Replaced Vista Social with Buffer for social media management.
2025-12-23	Replaced Vercel Analytics with Seline for website analytics.
2025-12-19	Added StopForumSpam for spam detection (free!).
2025-12-08	Published our year-end stack roundup.
2025-12-04	Removed Vista Social, Quickbooks, and Valtown from the stack.
2025-12-01	Stopped using Mimestream for email.
2025-11-24	Stopped using Groove for customer support.
2025-11-01	Added Pulumi for infrastructure as code.
2025-10-21	Added Have I Been Pwned for breach detection.
2025-08-01	Added Bunny (DNS), CleanShot (screenshots), Granola (notetaking), and Sendgrid (SMTP) over the summer.
2025-05-14	Started using Vista Social to manage social media accounts and Tailscale to manage the server storing internal docs. Stopped using Trotto (in favor of Tailscale's own OSS version).
2025-04-01	Replaced Depot with Blacksmith (faster, cheaper)
2025-01-09	So much stuff we had to write a whole blog post about it!
2024-07-10	Started using Depot to speed up GitHub Actions
2024-07-09	Started using Fivetran and Metabase to analyze data and construct a (janky, but useful!) WBR
2024-04-03	Started using Mercury as a banking solution
2024-03-28	Added Pika, Cloudflare, and a handful of other tools; churned from Texts, Sketch, Bear, and Imgix.
2024-03-14	Added Audiogest to the stack. It's a nice little tool!
2023-10-13	Had to bump up my Imgix plan from $75 to $200/mo because of traffic. Time to find something cheaper!
2023-08-22	Added val.town
2023-08-01	Add PopSQL (which technically I've been using for a while but forgot about)
2023-07-25	Migrated off of Heroku Redis and onto Redis Enterprise Cloud, which means saving $70/mo for five minutes of switching environment variables.
2023-07-24	Onboarded to Calibre.
2023-07-23	Purchased a reserved instance for my big ol' RDS database, saving $110/mo.
2023-07-20	Initial launch of this page.

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