Buttondown pricing, price hikes and cheaper alternatives
Buttondown (buttondown.com) is a newsletter platform. Base price by active subscribers, plus optional add-ons. Free plan: up to 100 subscribers.
What Buttondown costs
- 1k subscribers: $9/mo
- 5k subscribers: $29/mo
- 10k subscribers: $79/mo
- 25k subscribers: $239/mo
- 50k subscribers: $319/mo
- 100k subscribers: custom pricing
Plan compared: Base plan, no add-ons. Cheapest paid plan that can send a weekly newsletter to the whole list, billed monthly. Plans priced by emails sent assume one issue a week, about 4.3 emails per subscriber a month.
Buttondown price hikes
- Buttondown quietly cut what you get · Mar 14, 2023
Whitelabel and teams moved from Standard up to Professional; a $139 Advanced tier was added. - Buttondown moved to tiers and cut its free plan · May 13, 2022
Per-1,000 pricing replaced by tiers (a 10k list went from about $45 to $79) and the free plan dropped from 1,000 to 100 subscribers.
Cheaper alternatives to Buttondown
At 10k subs, Buttondown costs $79/mo. 3 newsletter platforms cost less:
- Sendy + SES: $4.30/mo (Self-hosted, SES à la carte at $0.10 per 1k)
- MailCheap: $39/mo (Plan for one issue a week (~4.3 emails per subscriber))
- Flodesk: $72/mo (Lite plan (Pro above 25k))
Buttondown alternatives: 3 cheaper newsletter platforms compared, at every size.
Every change we logged
- Mar 14, 2023 · Limits cut: Whitelabel and teams moved from Standard up to Professional; a $139 Advanced tier was added.
- May 13, 2022 · Price increase: Per-1,000 pricing replaced by tiers (a 10k list went from about $45 to $79) and the free plan dropped from 1,000 to 100 subscribers.
Sources
Pricing page: buttondown.com/pricing. Prices last checked Oct 16, 2026. Prices read from Buttondown's pricing slider (Oct 16, 2026); yearly billing is 10× the monthly price. Self-serve tiers run to 99,999 subscribers, then it's a custom quote. Prices assume at most one email a day to the whole list. The 2022 figure is computed (9 × $5).