Buttondown

Developer-friendly newsletter — Markdown-native, API-first, 100 subs free

Buttondown

Role

The family’s technical / developer audience newsletter. Used by oriz-blog-site as the digest sender for deep-dive engineering posts and by the @chirag127/oriz-omnipost cross-post engine as one of its publish targets.

Distinct from EmailOctopus, which sends visual marketing campaigns to a wider audience. Different audience, different tone, different free-tier ceiling.

Free tier

• 100 subscribers
• Markdown-native composition (the editor is Markdown, not WYSIWYG)
• Full REST API (programmatic publish + subscriber management)
• RSS-to-email automation
• Custom domain for sending
• Embed-able subscribe form

Card / subscription required?

NO. Free tier sign-up is email-only. No payment method requested.

Alternatives

• EmailOctopus — sibling, larger audience tier
• MailerLite — fallback marketing
• Resend — transactional only, not newsletter
• Substack — rejected, takes a 10% cut and platform-locks the audience

Swap cost

Low — Markdown content + CSV subscriber list export to anywhere. The oriz-omnipost adapter wraps the API behind the standard adapter interface from decisions/architecture/cross-post-engine.md.

Why this is our pick (for the developer audience)

Markdown + REST API + RSS-to-email is the right shape for a technical-blog digest where the content already lives as Markdown files in a git repo. WYSIWYG marketing tools (EmailOctopus, MailerLite) are wrong for that workflow — they fight the source of truth. Buttondown’s 100-subscriber cap is fine for a deep-dive newsletter that doesn’t want a wide audience.

Cross-refs

• Newsletter split decision
• EmailOctopus — marketing audience
• Resend — transactional
• oriz-omnipost glossary
• Cross-post engine decision
• No card-on-file rule

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