The best platforms to launch your own email newsletter

Email newsletters are thriving, and many seem to like to receive well-curated news directly in their inbox.

Some of the best examples include Heated (about the climate crisis), NextDraft (“the most fascinating news of the day”), TLDR (short tech news), and Morning Brew (a profound overview of current news). We also strongly recommend that you subscribe to the Popular Science newsletter to receive our best articles directly.

In addition to reading the newsletter, you can also create your own newsletter. Many platforms can help you get started for free, whether you want to be entertaining for entertainment purposes or use it as a significant source of income.

Should you create your own briefing?

Creating your own email newsletter is so easy and quick that you might want to start right away.

We absolutely encourage you to think carefully about what you want to write and how to present it so that your briefing is more likely to be successful.

Other briefings are a great place to start. They can inspire your own emails and give you an idea of ​​what your competitors are doing. Read them carefully and ask yourself how you can make your projects stand out from a growing group.

also take some time to think about the topics you want to cover. You may have some great ideas, but consider whether the same approach is sustainable in the long run. Remember that the more regular and frequent your briefings are, the more likely it is to attract followers and keep people coming back.

[Related: 25 Best Websites to Buy Instagram Followers (Real Fans)]

If you want to make money from a briefing, it is important to manage your expectations because subscribers are not easy. There are no shortcuts to building an audience, so be prepared to invest time and energy before seeing the results.

You do not need any technical or financial knowledge—the platform we highlight below will handle all the behind-the-scenes engineering on your behalf. You just need to write.

Select a platform

### Substack

Substack has attracted some well-known journalists and writers for obvious reasons. This is a sophisticated, professional platform designed to help you get into the email newsletter market. You can get up and running in minutes and there are guidance on every step.

The actual briefing editing is done in a clean and intuitive web application. You provide text and images and Substack makes it look beautiful. You don't get much help with layout or formatting options, but that's not the focus of this tool.

What the platform really does excel is the help and support it provides. You can access detailed analysis tools and even access a linked app to create and publish your own podcasts. If you want to go all out with the idea of ​​an email briefing, Substack is probably the best option.

If your briefing is free, Substack is free too. However, if you start charging, Substack takes 10% of each subscription payment as the fee for hosting your newsletter and giving you the tools to build it.

### Revue

Revue is run by Twitter and is perhaps Substack's most direct competitor. As with the previous platform on this list, getting started is very easy and it takes only a few minutes to write your first briefing.

All edits are done in the browser, with very little control over the layout – it includes basic text formatting and image import tools, and that's it. We do like the way you can quickly load links from other services including Instagram, Pocket and (of course) Twitter.

Substack has obvious advantages in terms of the ecosystem you can build around your briefings (such as podcasts) and the depth of its analysis. But Revue allows you to use custom domains and email addresses for free, and Substack charges for this.

You can start using Revue for free and you only need to pay if you start making money from your subscribers (rate is 5%). At the time of writing, that's only half what Substack charges.

### TinyLetter

As you might guess from the name, TinyLetter sticks to basic principles when building email briefings. This can be a pro or con, depending on how much time you want to invest in writing your email.

TinyLetter's compose screen looks like a compose window in email clients like Gmail. (If you like this, you should know that you can actually run your TinyLetter project from your email client if you want.) You have more options in terms of appearance and format than Substack or Revue — —For example, more fonts and alignment options — and it's very easy to use.

[Related: This quirky-looking font can help you remember what you read]

In TinyLetter, you don't get many extra features like analytics or podcast tools. It also only works with free newsletters, so you can't make money through this platform. This can cause problems because it forces you to start over elsewhere if you want to take advantage of any attention your briefing may get in the future.

TinyLetter is so restricted is partly because it is run by email marketing giant MailChimp. If you need more features, such as the ability to charge subscribers, you can switch directly to the platform, although it contains many business-centric extras that many people don’t need. For newsletters with less than 2,000 subscribers, MailChimp is free.

### EmailOctopus

Like MailChimp, EmailOctopus is more of an enterprise email marketing platform than an email briefing service, so it has many features that may only be attractive to businesses. However, for individuals, it is also one of the larger platforms that is easier to get started.

You can get started for free, and while the web interface is not as easy as other services on this list, you can get more options to customize the look of the newsletter, including many you can adjust to suit your audience template.

As an email marketing platform, EmailOctopus provides you with many additional tools to experiment. These include the ability to manage contacts by group and the options to get detailed analysis of briefings, such as time data for people to open briefings.

EmailOctopus is free to accommodate up to 2500 email subscribers, but you will see the service’s brand identity on the newsletter you send. To remove these restrictions, you need a professional version plan that starts at $24 per month.

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