beehiiv

beehiiv is a newsletter product first, and its website is where the newsletter lives between sends. Posts arrive as email and stay as pages, the audience is the mailing list, and the tools around it are aimed at growing and eventually charging that audience. A custom domain works on the free tier, which puts a publication on an address its writer owns at no cost.

Beyond that the plan structure works against a small publisher. Ordinary pages — an about page, a contact page — need the third tier, so the free plan publishes posts but not much of a site around them.

The downside is the vendor mark. Removing it is reserved for the top tier, which is billed annually at a figure well above anything else in this part of the directory. A publication that wants to look like its own thing rather than a page on a platform is therefore looking at the most expensive plan on the list, and that price is itself a floor because it scales with how many subscribers are active.