41 Tools That Might Make Your Newsletter Better

The right set of tools can make all the difference for a newsletter operator.

When I first started my newsletter, I had a simple set of tools: an email service provider (TinyLetter) and Google Docs, which I used for both writing and publishing. I didn’t need much more than that to launch my newsletter.

But as it grew — and when I eventually launched a business from that newsletter — I had to add more tools to the Inbox Collective tech stack. I switched to a more powerful email platform (Mailchimp), built out a website (using WordPress and Bluehost), started converting readers to subscribers (OptinMonster, WPForms), and added tools to measure the success of my newsletter (Fathom Analytics, Glueletter). The more the business around my newsletter expands, the more I look to add new tools to help me with all parts of the newsletter, from deliverability to productivity (and just about everything in between).

Between my newsletter and my work with clients through Inbox Collective, I’ve tested hundreds of email tools. Everything in this guide is something that A) I like and recommend, and B) I have used myself or with clients.

There are plenty of tools I’ve left off this list. Some productivity tools, like Trello or Notion, are great, but you can find recommendations elsewhere on the web for those. If you’re looking for recommendations around email platforms, I’ve got a massive guide to six of my favorite platforms — AWeber, Beehiiv, ConvertKit, Ghost, Mailchimp, and Substack — at this link.

I’ve tried to stick to what I do best in this guide: Helping people figure out how to build a great email strategy. In this guide, you’ll find tools that can help you:

• Design a newsletter
• Grow a newsletter
• Launch a newsletter
• Measure the success of a newsletter
• Monetize a newsletter
• Monitor deliverability

I’ve got an affiliate relationship with some of these tools, and Inbox Collective will receive a small commission or referral fee when you use them. (I’d certainly appreciate it if you used the links in our stories and on this page — this is one way you can support our work at Inbox Collective!) But some are simply tools that I recommend and love, like Litmus, Passionfroot, and Zapier, and many of the tools on this list are completely free to use.

I hope that as you look through this guide, you’ll find a tool or two to help you build the best version of your newsletter.

AboutMy.Email

What it’s good for: Improving deliverability, Designing a newsletter

AboutMy.Email is one of my favorite new tools of 2024. When you go to their site, you will get a one-time-only email address. (These are usually pretty quirky — recently, I’ve gotten test email addresses like monkey.dragon.polo@aboutmy.email.) From your email service provider, you send a test email to that address and then click back to the AboutMy.Email tab in your browser. Within a few seconds, you’ll get a snapshot of key details about your email, including whether you’re fully compliant with Gmail and Yahoo’s new rules. It’s also a great way to see if your email is clipping — that happens if your email is 102 kb or larger and can cause issues ranging from a drop in clicks to deliverability issues. AboutMy.Email will show you exactly how big your newsletter is.

One of the best things about the tool is: It’s absolutely free to use.

Try AboutMy.Email via this link.

Beefree

What it’s good for: Designing a newsletter, Creating a landing page, Improving your newsletter workflow

Beefree is an email design tool that’s great for individuals or small teams. Their templates are compatible with dozens of email service providers or ESPs, including ActiveCampaign, Brevo, Klaviyo, and Mailchimp, so it’s a great option for building beautiful templates for your newsletter or marketing messages. Their drag-and-drop builder allows anyone to design a newsletter — you don’t need to know HTML or CSS to build something. Multiple team members can edit and comment on an email in real-time, which allows you to collaborate on a new design. When it’s time to hit send, you can click a button and automatically move the finished design to your ESP to send.

Another nice thing about Beefree: If you’re selling a new product, like an ebook or course, you can design the landing page in Beefree and then export the HTML to your site.

For individuals who only need to design a few emails per year, Beefree is free. For larger teams, you might pay anywhere from $625 to $1,600 per year. Non-profits can apply for a credit of up to $1,000 per year.

Try Beefree via this link.

Bluehost

What it’s good for: Hosting your website, Launching your newsletter

The best hosting services are the ones you never have to think about — they keep your site secure and just work — and that’s what Bluehost does. It’s particularly great for anyone using WordPress to manage their website — it’s what I use to host inboxcollective.com — though you can use it without WordPress. If you need help, you can reach their customer service team quickly, including by phone. You can also buy domains through Bluehost.

Bluehost offers many different pricing plans, depending on the size of your website and business. You’ll want to do some comparison shopping before buying, but most indie newsletters would be just fine on one of their basic plans, which start at about $96 per year if you agree to a 36-month plan. (You may be able to get a more discounted rate if you’re a new customer.)

Try Bluehost via this link.

Carrd

What it’s good for: Hosting your website, Launching your newsletter, Creating a landing page

Carrd is a tool that lets you quickly build landing pages, and you don’t need to know how to code to use it. The first version of just about any project I launch starts on Carrd. It’s what I used to build the first sign-up page for my newsletter and the first version of dineanddeliver.com. I love that they have out-of-the-box templates you can use — I’ve been able to get entire landing pages up in less than 30 minutes, thanks to Carrd. If you’re selling something, you can embed elements from tools like Gumroad or Stripe. It also works with custom domains, but if you don’t have a domain, they’ll host the page on their site.

Carrd is so cheap that, honestly, I’ve thought about emailing their founders and asking if I could pay more. I’m on their Pro Plus plan, one of the more expensive plans they offer, and it costs $49 a year. It’s a great deal for such a powerful tool.

Try Carrd via this link.

Chamaileon

What it’s good for: Designing a newsletter, Improving your newsletter workflow

Chamaileon is a third-party email builder that helps you design beautiful emails. It’s fantastic for larger organizations with more complex design needs, and its templates are compatible with dozens of ESPs, including Mailchimp, Iterabile, Salesforce, and SendGrid. When I work with a team that might have dozens of people involved in building a newsletter, I usually point them toward Chamaileon. 

You can create your own email design system with Chamaileon, with fonts, colors, and designs customized to your org. Let’s say you’ve got elements you frequently include within a newsletter, like a weekly question or poll for readers. You can build those elements as blocks in Chamaileon and drag and drop them into the template when needed. You can edit each part of the template down to the most granular elements. If you need to set rules for which members of your team can edit or modify templates, you can do that. It has some smart features, like the ability to automatically add UTMs of your choosing (like a source or campaign name to help you track where clicks came from) to every link in the newsletter. And when you’re ready to send, you click a button, and the template automatically moves into your ESP.

Plus, they offer onboarding for new clients. Their team will help you set up your templates in Chamaileon and train your staff to use the platform to ensure you’re ready to hit the ground running. 

Chamaileon is a very advanced builder but is more expensive than other builders. A typical plan costs about $5,000 per year, though they do offer discounts for non-profits, those in the education space, or smaller teams.

Try Chamaileon via this link.

Databox

What it’s good for: Measuring the success of your newsletter

Databox is a third-party data tool that allows you to pull data out of key sources and create dashboards or visualizations to share that data with your team. What’s especially powerful is that you can pull from so many places — an ESP, like Campaign Monitor; an analytics tool, like Google Analytics; and a monetization tool, like Stripe — and bring all that data into a single place. You can customize the dashboards to show whatever data you want: Newsletter growth, reader engagement, revenue — whatever. I find that larger organizations, like newsrooms, tend to get lots of value from a tool like Databox. (Many publishers display these on TV screens around their offices.)

Individuals or small teams can use Databox for free. Larger teams might pay anywhere from about $560 per year up to about $2,500 per year, depending on the number of users who need access to Databox and the number of sources you need to connect to Databox.

Try Databox via this link.

Discord

What it’s good for: Building a community outside your newsletter, Getting readers to support your work

Lots of newsletter operators — we’ve written about a few — choose to build digital communities where readers can gather to talk, share ideas, or debate topics related to the newsletter. Many communities are invite-only, so you must be a paying supporter of the newsletter to get access. Discord, which first gained popularity among video game streamers, is a popular choice for newsletter operators who build communities. With Discord, you can set up different channels (think: chat rooms) where readers can talk about specific topics and assign certain roles for users so they can post in a specific channel or help moderate the conversation.

It’s free to set up your own Discord server. Discord also offers the ability to sell memberships or merch right within Discord. (They do take a 10% cut of all payments.)

Try Discord via this link.

Domainr

What it’s good for: Launching your newsletter

Domainr is an amazing search engine for website domains. Let’s say I’m thinking of launching a new website called Dan Loves Newsletters, but I want to see if any domains are available. With Domainr, I can type in “Dan Loves Newsletters” and see what’s available. It’ll show me that danlovesnewsletters.com is for purchase, as are other variations: .net, .org, and .ai. But Domainr will also dig up other versions I hadn’t considered, like danlovesnewslette.rs. If I’m thinking of launching a new website, Domainr is always the first place I go — I want to make sure I buy all the related domains before I do anything else.

Domainr is completely free to use.

Try Domainr via this link.

Donorbox

What it’s good for: Getting readers to support your work

Donorbox is an online donation and payment platform that works with both for-profit and non-profit businesses. It allows readers to make one-time or recurring payments. What’s great about Donorbox is how simple it is to set up a page where readers can support your newsletter — even organizations that aren’t terribly tech-savvy find Donorbox easy to use. With Donorbox, you can choose which payment methods to accept: Apple Pay, Google Pay, credit or debit card, PayPal, Venmo, or even bank transfer. As of this writing, it also works with 49 different currencies, including ones in countries that Stripe doesn’t support, like Argentina, India, and Israel.

Donorbox is free to use, but they take 1.75% of all payments collected, plus a fee for Stripe (2.2% of payments, plus $0.30) or PayPal (1.99%, plus $0.49). If you’d like additional features, including a Zapier integration and the ability to customize forms, you can pay $1,668 per year for their Pro plan. You’ll still have to pay the Stripe or PayPal fees, but Donorbox only takes 1.5% of all payments collected on Pro.

Try Donorbox via this link.

Email Preview

What it’s good for: Saving old newsletters

There are times when I need to be able to share a newsletter. Maybe an advertiser wants to see the newsletter they advertised in, or maybe I want to share an interesting newsletter design with a client. Could I forward that newsletter to them? Sure, but sometimes, the design breaks down in the forwarding process.

That’s where Email Preview is so useful: You grab the .eml file for the newsletter. (In Gmail, open the newsletter you want on your laptop/desktop, click on the three dots in the top right corner, then click “Download Message.) Then, it automatically grabs all the data — the HTML, the subject line, the preheader text — and turns that into a .pdf, .jpg., or .png file that you can download. It’s super simple but really useful.

Also, it’s completely free to use.

Try Email Preview via this link.

Fathom Analytics

What it’s good for: Measuring the success of your newsletter

Fathom Analytics allows you to track engagement on your website — it’s what I use for Inbox Collective. What I love about Fathom is that it’s so simple to use. I work with plenty of large organizations that need the sophistication of a platform like Google Analytics, but I don’t need that for my own site. Fathom gives you a tiny bit of code to add to your website, but that only takes a few clicks. (They have a plugin to install the code on WordPress sites.) For my site, I only need a few pieces of data: How many visitors came to my website, which stories they read, and how long they spent on the website. Fathom gives me all that data on a single page. I can use UTMs to see what happened after readers clicked through from my newsletter, and it can also send me a weekly or monthly report with key data. Plus, it’s privacy-friendly — there’s no need for me to track my users, as other analytics tools do. Fathom gives me the data I need and nothing more.

With Fathom, you pay based on the number of monthly page views on your site. If your site gets 100,000 pageviews or less, you’ll pay $180 a year. (The pricing’s still reasonable even if you’ve got a large site — it costs $720 a year for a site with up to 1 million monthly page views.)

Try Fathom Analytics via this link.

Feedletter

What it’s good for: Running polls, Collecting feedback from readers

Some ESPs, like Beehiiv or Substack, make it easy to run polls within a newsletter. For those on a platform without built-in polling, take a look at a tool like Feedletter. You can set up a simple poll to let readers vote on how they felt about that day’s newsletter edition. It’s also perfect for a one-question poll. After they click, you can send readers to a page where they can answer additional questions if you so choose. Feedletter stores all the results — clicks and open-ended feedback — so you can break down the data. If you want to add feedback widgets on your website, you can do that through Feedletter, too.

Feedletter costs $120 per year.

Try Feedletter via this link.

Glueletter

What it’s good for: Measuring the success of your newsletter, Improving your newsletter workflow

Many ESPs were built for marketers or small businesses, not newsletter operators, so the analytics you’ll get in your dashboards don’t always show you what you want to see. There are some exceptions, but many operators find their ESP’s dashboards lacking. That’s where a tool like Glueletter comes in handy. It connects via API to several major ESPs, including ActiveCampaign, Mailchimp, Sailthru, and Salesforce, and pulls key data around engagement and growth into easy-to-read dashboards. You can track clicks for a specific advertiser and even set up a report to automatically email that advertiser with the data. Through machine learning, Glueletter can tell you which topics are getting clicked on the most, and it can set up an RSS feed with the most clicked stories from a particular date range (like the past 7 or 30 days). If your ESP has an RSS-to-email feature, you can take that feed and set up a newsletter for readers using that feed.

But the killer feature of Glueletter is the ability to share reports with your team. Several of my clients have a dozen or more newsletters, and trying to share data with the editors or writers of those newsletters can be a pain. With Glueletter, you can set up automations so specific staff automatically get an email or Slack message (they can choose which they prefer) about the performance of their latest newsletter. It’ll also send monthly reports to staffers of your choosing. When it comes to sharing data with a large team, Glueletter is one of the best solutions on the market.

Pricing is based on the number of unique newsletters you want to track. (If you’ve got a daily newsletter and a business newsletter, you’d have two newsletters, regardless of how many editions of each you send per month.) To track one newsletter, Glueletter costs $1,188 per year. To track five, it costs $2,388. To track 10, it costs $4,788, and if you want to track unlimited newsletters, it costs $11,988.

Try Glueletter via this link.

Google Postmaster

What it’s good for: Improving deliverability

When Gmail and Yahoo rolled out new requirements for newsletters in February 2024, one of the big ones was around spam complaints. In our guide to the changes, I wrote:

Gmail says spam complaint rates should stay below 0.1% and never rise above 0.3%. Yahoo says rates should stay below 0.3%. In general, I’d stick with Gmail’s number: 0.1% is the threshold to stay under.

But Gmail doesn’t share that data with your ESP. In order to track it, you’ll want to set up Google Postmaster. Once it’s set up, you’ll get a few interesting data points from Google Postmaster, including spam complaints and data about your domain’s health. If a client ever experiences deliverability issues, Google Postmaster is one of the first places I go to diagnose the issue.

Google Postmaster is free to use. 

Try Google Postmaster via this link.

Google Workspace

What it’s good for: Improving productivity, Launching your newsletter 

The Gmail and Yahoo changes require that you use a professional email address to send a newsletter — you can’t send from your.name@gmail.com anymore. (One exception: Certain ESPs, like Substack, handle the email address for you.) Google Workspace will allow you to set up that professional email address to send and receive email from. Google Workspace also allows you to connect Docs, Sheets, or Slides to your custom domain, so if I share a Google Doc with a client, it can come from dan@inboxcollective.com instead of my Gmail address.

Google Workspace starts at $72 per user per year.

Try Google Workspace via this link.

Gumroad

What it’s good for: Selling stuff, Getting readers to support your work

Let’s say you wrote an ebook or built a digital course and want to sell it directly to your audience. What are your options?

A good one is Gumroad, which allows you to sell that product directly to readers and then use its automation feature to set up follow-up emails so readers can download the book, start the course, or get access to whatever you’ve just sold them. You could also use Gumroad to sell a membership — it does allow you to set up recurring payments. You could do all this using a Gumroad page, which you can easily design and publish, or use a platform like Carrd or WordPress and embed Gumroad’s forms there.

Another nice feature: You can set anyone up as an affiliate to recommend your product. For instance, When CJ Chilvers released his ebook on email marketing, he set up Inbox Collective as an affiliate. For every purchase made through our unique link, Inbox Collective received a small commission.

There’s no monthly or annual fee to use Gumroad, but they do take 10% of all purchases.

Try Gumroad via this link.

Kickbox

What it’s good for: Improving deliverability

When someone signs up for your newsletter, you have two options: You can add them to your list with a single click or require them to verify their email via a double opt-in email. But whichever route you go, you should still have some sort of protection on your sign-up forms to make sure spammy sign-ups don’t get through. You can protect your forms via a tool like Kickbox, which checks each email address against a list of verified emails. If it sees something suspicious, like a bunch of sign-ups coming in rapid succession from the same IP address, it can block those from coming through. You can also use it to let a reader know that they’ve made a typo in their email — no more your.name@gmail.commm emails accidentally ending up on your list.

Pricing is based on the number of email addresses you need to verify. It costs $80 to verify 10,000 emails, $800 to verify 100,000, and $4,000 to verify a million emails. (They also offer tiers in between.)

Try Kickbox via this link.

Litmus

What it’s good for: Designing a newsletter, Improving deliverability, Improving productivity, Personalizing a newsletter

Litmus offers a suite of tools to help newsletter operators. My favorite is a tool to run quality assurance, or QA, tests. You send Litmus a sample newsletter, and it’ll show you what it looks like in more than 100 different email clients and devices. If you’re trying to test out a design and make sure it looks good in, say, the Yahoo mobile app or in Microsoft Outlook, Litmus will show you what readers using those clients will see. Plus, it’ll show you if there are any broken links, help you identify accessibility issues, and let you know if there might be any potential trouble with spam filters.

But Litmus is more than just a testing tool. Some large teams use it to speed up productivity — Litmus offers the ability to leave comments and notes for co-workers as you review a newsletter. Others use their Litmus Personalize features to add countdown clocks, live polls, or personalized images within a newsletter.

Individuals will pay $1,188 per year for Litmus, while small teams will pay $2,388 per year.

Try Litmus via this link.

Megahit

What it’s good for: Selling sponsorships, Gathering data about your readers

Some of your best potential advertisers might already be reading your newsletter. Megahit is a tool that cross-references your list of subscribers against data from Apollo and then shows you who’s on your email list, what companies they work at, and what they do at their companies. Through Megahit, I was able to identify key contacts at the companies I wanted to sponsor my newsletter, and since they were already reading my newsletter, that made setting up a call to talk about sponsorship quite a bit easier. Plus, you can use Megahit to understand deeper trends about your readers. For my list, I discovered that two out of every five readers work in the C-suite at their company — a stat I quickly added to my media kit.

Pricing for Megahit starts at $500 but may vary based on the number of contacts for which you need data.

Try Megahit via this link.

Memberful

What it’s good for: Getting readers to support your work

Memberful makes it easy for readers to pay to support your newsletter. Maybe you’ve got a paid subscription product, where readers pay for access to exclusive content, or a membership, where they might get a mix of content, community, and conversations. Memberful could help with either of those. It integrates with lots of tools — ConvertKit, Drip, Mailerlite, and WordPress, among others — allowing you to build out a subscription or membership using whatever platforms you prefer. They can also accept one-time payments if that’s what you choose to offer. They handle the checkout forms, analytics, and transactional emails, so you don’t have to worry about getting too in the weeds to figure out that part of the business.

Memberful costs $49 per month, and then takes 4.9% of all payments processed. Stripe takes their cut, too: 2.9% plus $0.30 per transaction.

Try Memberful via this link.

Newsletter Glue

What it’s good for: Designing a newsletter, Improving your newsletter workflow

Newsletter Glue is a plugin specifically for newsletter operators who also publish stories on WordPress. It’s designed to help you quickly publish a newsletter — you can write everything in WordPress and easily add stories (which can auto-populate with the headline, copy, and image, even if they’re stories published on another site). You can’t design something quite as sophisticated as you would in a builder like Beefree, Chamaileon, or Stripo, but you can customize colors and styles, and the newsletters built-in Newsletter Glue look really good. You can add conditional language to show or hide content — for instance, based on whether or not a reader has donated to your org. When you’re ready to hit send, you click a button, and Newsletter Glue automatically sends out the newsletter via the email platform of your choice. Right now, it integrates with over a dozen ESPs, including ActiveCampaign, Klaviyo, Mailchimp, and Salesforce Marketing. 

The big advantage with Newsletter Glue is the speed at which you can build a newsletter. I have a few large newsroom clients who use it, and many were able to cut their production time in half with Newsletter Glue. It’s also great for teams where staff is really comfortable with WordPress but less comfortable with their ESP. With Newsletter Glue, you can bring everything under one platform everyone knows how to use.

Most publishers will pay $1,440 per year for Newsletter Glue, though they do offer an Enterprise plan (with additional support and onboarding) that starts at $10,000 per year.

Try Newsletter Glue via this link.

Newspack Newsletters

What it’s good for: Designing a newsletter, Improving your newsletter workflow

Newspack Newsletters is a lot like Newsletter Glue — just a bit more bare bones. It’s also a WordPress plugin where you can write a newsletter within WordPress and then send via your ESP. (Right now, it supports four ESPs: ActiveCampaign, Campaign Monitor, Constant Contact, and Mailchimp.) There are a few templates you can use, though the design options are pretty limited. Still, it does make it easy to build and send newsletters and has the advantage of being something anyone who uses WordPress can easily use.

Although it’s not quite as sophisticated as Newsletter Glue, Newspack Newsletters has one thing going for it: It’s free to use.

Try Newspack Newsletters via this link.

OptinMonster

What it’s good for: Growing your email list

OptinMonster is one of a handful of growth tools I swear by — it’s what I use here on Inbox Collective to run pop-ups, full-screen takeovers, banners, and other widgets to convert readers to newsletter subscribers. What’s great about OptinMonster is how versatile the tool is: They have hundreds of different templates you can work off of to quickly create your own modal to convert readers on your website, or you can build your own from scratch. Everything on that modal, down to the fonts and padding, can be customized. You can customize exactly which pages each modal should be shown on and when. (For instance, you can choose to show something based on the amount of time on site, scroll depth on a page, or number of pages visited.) If you want to A/B test different modals to see which converts best, you can do that. 

OptinMonster integrates with more than 30 ESPs, and they also have plugins with most major publishing platforms, like WordPress or Squarespace. I also like their analytics — I can see which pages and which modals drove the most sign-ups, and I can adjust when a pop-up or embed is performing below my baseline for success.

Pricing is based on the number of pageviews on your site. Someone with 10,000 pageviews per month on their site will pay about $100 for the first year, while someone with 100,000 pageviews per month will pay about $300 for the first year.

Try OptinMonster via this link.

Otter

What it’s good for: Improving productivity, Transcribing interviews or meetings

I do a lot of interviews for Inbox Collective — some that get turned into Q&As and some where a few key quotes might get inserted into a reported feature. Doing the interviews is the easy part, but transcribing all those interviews often takes hours. (For every minute of conversation, I’ve found that it usually takes 2-3 minutes to transcribe — so a 30-minute interview takes 90-minutes to transcribe.)

But Otter is an AI tool that significantly speeds up that process. You upload the audio from your interview, and Otter transcribes it, usually within a few minutes. You’ll still need to make some edits — I find that Otter gets the interviews about 75% of the way there, but it might not understand every word, and it often puts punctuation in the wrong places. But it usually saves me a few hours per month in transcription.

Plus, you can connect it to your digital meeting tool of choice — like Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, or Zoom — to take notes during the meeting.

Most Otter users will pay $120 per year per user for their Pro plan, which includes 1,200 minutes of transcription per month.

Try Otter via this link.

Outgrow

What it’s good for: Growing your email list, Surveying your audience, Gathering data about your readers

Outgrow offers a pretty unique set of growth tools. You can set up tons of different unique tools for your readers, like calculators, forms, surveys, quizzes, or giveaways — all of which can include a sign-up option for your newsletter. Yes, a pop-up or landing page might convert readers, but so might a quiz or a calculator to help a reader learn something new, and Outgrow can help you quickly build and embed those on your site. You could also use it to collect more information about your readers, which might help you better personalize newsletters for readers.

Outgrow has native integrations with ESPs like AWeber, ConvertKit, and Mailchimp, so you can collect an email and send it directly to your ESP.

They have four different tiers — higher tiers allow you to use different templates. (For instance, their most basic tier does not include the ability to deploy forms, surveys, or giveaways.) But the big difference is based on the number of email addresses you collect through Outgrow per year. If you collect 3,000 emails per year, you’ll pay $168 per year. 12,000 emails will cost $300 per year, and 90,000 emails will cost $1,140 per year.

Try Outgrow via this link.

Passionfroot

What it’s good for: Selling sponsorships

Passionfroot lets anyone set up a storefront where advertisers can buy ads in your newsletter, podcast, or on one of your social media channels. On your sales page, you can share data about your audience — list size, open rates, reader demographics, etc. — and then list out the price points for each of the ads you offer. If you don’t want to share those price points on the page, that’s OK — sponsors can select that offer and then fill out a form to get in touch with you to learn more. Many teams that use Passionfroot link to their sales page in their newsletter or on their website. For a busy team that wants to sell ads but doesn’t have the bandwidth to handle each sale individually, Passionfroot might be a good option.

Passionfroot doesn’t charge an annual fee, but they do take 2% of all sales, plus there’s the Stripe fee (2.9% + $0.30 per transaction).

Try Passionfroot via this link.

Pika

What it’s good for: Displaying content, Improving productivity

Pika makes it easy to create gorgeous screenshots in seconds. I use it with many of the images you see on Inbox Collective stories. (I used Pika to create all of the screenshots in this story.) It’s also great for converting tweets or testimonials into images. Those are small tasks that seem easy to do but often take a ton of time. Pika can handle them super quickly so you can get back to your newsletter.

Pika costs $120 per year.

Try Pika via this link.

Podia

What it’s good for: Selling stuff, Hosting your website, Creating a landing page

Podia is a platform that makes it easy to sell whatever it is you’re building. Launching a course? A workshop? An ebook? Selling coaching or a coaching session? You could do all of that via Podia. You can build the landing page for the product and sell everything in one place. Plus, if you’re putting together some sort of on-demand product, like a course, readers who buy the course can access all the materials within Podia. You can lay out the course lessons, add video or text, and offer .pdfs for anyone to download.

Some creators also use Podia to build basic websites, which you can host on podia.com or your own domain. They offer some out-of-the-box templates you can customize that don’t require knowledge of HTML/CSS.

Podia does offer a free plan with the ability to sell one product. (The catch: On the free plan, they take 10% of all sales.) More advanced operators who are selling multiple products will want to look at their Mover plan, which costs $396 per year. Podia only takes 5% of the fees on the Mover plan. On all of their plans, there will be additional Stripe fees of 2.9% + $0.30 per transaction.

Try Podia via this link.

Postmark’s DMARC monitoring tool

What it’s good for: Improving deliverability

I’ll admit: If you’re not super technical, trying to understand DMARC can be pretty confusing. DMARC is one of the three authentication tools that Gmail and Yahoo now require from pretty much every newsletter operator, and when you set up DMARC, you’ll start getting dozens of emails every day, filled with gobbledygook that really only makes sense if you’re a deliverability expert.

The better option is to use a DMARC monitoring tool, like the one from Postmark, to pull all your DMARC reports into one place and show you what’s happening. With their DMARC monitoring tool, you’ll get one weekly email update that shows how many of your emails are passing authentication and let you know if there’s anything that needs fixing.

Postmark’s tool is free to use, but if you want access to a web dashboard with more analytics and additional email reports, you can pay $168 per year.

Try Postmark’s DMARC monitoring tool via this link.

RightMessage

What it’s good for: Growing your email list, Gathering data about your readers

RightMessage is a tool that helps you convert readers to email subscribers and collect additional data about those readers. Let’s talk about the growth part first. They’ve got lots of different conversion modals you can run, from pop-ups to toaster units and quizzes. And within these units, you can actually create little journeys. So, let’s say here on Inbox Collective that I want to run a unique call-to-action, or CTA, based on each reader. Instead of showing the sign-up box right away, I might ask them if they produce a newsletter for themselves or for work. If they answer “for work,” I’d follow up with a question about where they work: Is it a newsroom? A non-profit? A small business? Once they answer that, I’d show them a CTA customized based on that answer. (The messaging that resonates for someone in the ecommerce space might be a lot different than the messaging that works for an indie newsletter operator.)

But the really cool thing with RightMessage is how you can then use that data to learn more about your audience. RightMessage can sync their answers with your ESP, allowing you to tag readers based on their answers. You can also use RightMessage to run a multi-question survey after they sign up, like in the example below, and then use your ESP to target readers with special offers based on their choices.

One thing to know about RightMessage: It integrates with several ESPs, but their integrations with ConvertKit and Klaviyo are more robust than others.

RightMessage pricing is based on the number of monthly visitors to your site. If you have 10,000 visitors per month, you’ll pay $948 per year. If you have 100,000 monthly visitors, you’ll pay $2,749 per year. 1 million monthly visitors would cost $8,028 per year.

Try RightMessage via this link.

Sales Pro

What it’s good for: Selling sponsorships

Sales Pro, from Who Sponsors Stuff, is a directory of advertisers who like to buy ads in newsletters. They track hundreds of newsletters, and when they spot a new advertiser in a newsletter, they add them to their database. But you don’t just get the brand’s name — you’ll also get the contact information for that advertiser so you can figure out who you should be talking to in order to sell ads in your newsletter. It’s a huge time-saver for your newsletter’s sales team since you’ll be able to get directly to the right person to sell ads, and you’ll know up front that they already like advertising in newsletters, which should speed up the sales process.

Sales Pro isn’t cheap — it costs $8,000 per year. But for many newsletters, if you sell even a handful of advertisements based on the data in Sales Pro, you’ll quickly make your money back on that investment.

Try Sales Pro via this link.

Senja

What it’s good for: Collecting feedback from readers

Senja makes it really easy to collect testimonials from readers about why they love your newsletter. You can collect written or video testimonials, and then Senja gives you many different ways to display those testimonials. Want to add a carousel of a few testimonials that rotate on a donation page? Or what about adding a quote from an influencer or some avatars from happy readers on your newsletter landing page? Senja can do all of that.

What’s great is how many different ways testimonials can be useful: They work great as a way to offer social proof that readers should sign up for your newsletter, but they can also be useful to nudge readers to buy something or support your work.

Most newsletter operators will be best served on their Starter plan, which costs $192 and allows you to collect unlimited testimonials.

Try Senja via this link.

Slack

What it’s good for: Building a community outside your newsletter, Getting readers to support your work, Improving productivity

There are two ways you could think about using Slack:

The first is as an alternative to Discord. You’d offer access to an exclusive community built on Slack and create channels where your readers can come to talk or debate ideas. Access to those Slack channels could be a reason that some readers pay to support your newsletter.

The other use is as a productivity tool. If you’ve got multiple people on your newsletter team, you can create channels to ensure you’re moving through the workflow for that day’s newsletter or sharing wins about a recent newsletter.

Slack is free to use, but teams that use it for work may want to upgrade to the Pro plan, which costs $87 per user per year.

Try Slack via this link.

SparkLoop

What it’s good for: Growing your newsletter list, Getting readers to support your work

SparkLoop offers a suite of tools to help you grow your newsletter. One of their most powerful is the SparkLoop partner network. You can pay other operators to promote your newsletter to their audience, either within their emails or after a reader signs up for their newsletter. They don’t even need to be on the same ESP as you. SparkLoop integrates with two dozen ESPs, including AWeber, ConvertKit, Mailchimp, and SailThru. You set the rate you’re willing to pay per subscriber, and you can also set rules so you only pay if a reader maintains a certain level of engagement in the first few days after sign-up.

You could also get paid to promote other newsletters. SparkLoop has a tool called Upscribe — it’s a widget that appears after someone signs up for your newsletter. If you promote newsletters in the partner network through Upscribe, you get paid for every sign-up you drive. (You could also use Upscribe for unpaid promotion of a friend’s newsletter — a tactic known as cross-promotion.)

If you want to run a referral program where readers receive rewards — from ebooks to discount codes to merchandise — in exchange for referring friends to a newsletter, SparkLoop can help. They even have an integration with Printful, which allows you to fulfill physical rewards, like printing T-shirts or hats, whenever a reader hits a specific referral milestone.

Most of SparkLoop’s tools are now free to use, but if you want to run a referral program, that costs $2,000 per year. If you’re paying other newsletters to promote your newsletter via the partner network, there’s no fee. If you’re promoting other partners, SparkLoop takes a 20% cut of your earnings.

Try SparkLoop via this link.

Sponsy

What it’s good for: Selling sponsorships, Improving productivity

Sponsy is a tool that makes managing newsletter sponsorships easy. It’s like a superpowered version of Airtable but built specifically to manage your ad inventory. 

Let’s say you’ve got a newsletter that comes out five days a week, and you’ve got a featured ad slot, as well as three smaller classified-style ads towards the bottom. Every week, you’d have up to 20 different advertisers in your newsletter, each with its own ad copy, links, and images. Sponsy is a tool that allows you to manage all that so you can see which ads go in which newsletters and which advertisers haven’t delivered their ads to you. You can set up a portal so advertisers deliver the ads to the right place (instead of making you search through your inbox for that image they sent you a month ago), and you can set up automations to remind advertisers about deadlines. You can even get metrics in Sponsy about ad performance — it integrates with ESPs like Beehiiv, Ghost, Mailchimp, and SparkPost to pull data about your ads into Sponsy instead of manually tracking clicks and conversions.

Plus, they’ve just started rolling out the ability to set up a storefront so advertisers can book an ad, enter their ad copy, and make a payment all through Sponsy.

Sponsy pricing is based largely on the number of newsletters you’ll be selling ads for. If you’re selling ads for just one newsletter, it costs $1,529 per year. If you’re selling ads for three newsletters, it costs $3,839. (If you have more than that, you can contact them for custom pricing.)

Try Sponsy via this link.

Stripe

What it’s good for: Selling stuff, Getting readers to support your work

Stripe is the tool that actually processes many of the payments you make on the web. If you pay for a newsletter subscription through a platform like ConvertKit or Ghost, sell an ad through Passionfroot, or pay for pretty much anything else on the web, Stripe is the thing that’s charging your credit card.

But you don’t have to use it through another platform. You can set up your own Stripe link to sell stuff — subscriptions, ads, merch, ebooks. The advantage here is that you may be able to save money by going directly through Stripe instead of using another tool. The disadvantage is that Stripe’s just a payment tool — it doesn’t offer the analytics of a tool like Memberful or the ability to send newsletters like Substack.

One downside to Stripe: It doesn’t work in all countries. (Here’s the current list of supported countries.) For those in a country not supported by Stripe, I’d recommend taking a look at PayPal as a backup option.

Stripe is free to use, but they do take 2.9% of all payments plus $0.30 per transaction.

Try Stripe via this link.

Stripo

What it’s good for: Designing a newsletter, Improving your newsletter workflow

Stripo is a third-party email builder to help you design beautiful newsletters. Like Beefree or Chamaileon, they offer several pre-built templates you can work off of, as well as integrations with dozens of ESPs, including AWeber, Hubspot, Iterable, and Mailgun. But the big differentiator with Stripo is that they offer the ability to add AMP for Email elements to a newsletter. AMP for Email allows you to add interactive elements, like forms or surveys, right within a newsletter. (I’ll mention here: AMP for Email doesn’t work with every inbox provider, though it does work with AOL, Gmail, and Yahoo. You’ll also want to check to make sure your ESP supports it.) Stripo allows you to build these AMP for Email elements into your newsletter. For teams who are thinking about deploying AMP for Email in their newsletters, I often recommend they start by using Stripo instead of dedicating in-house development resources to coding these emails.

Stripo pricing is based on the number of users who need access to your account and the number of emails you need to export. Smaller teams might be able to get by on their Basic plan, which allows for 1 user, 50 exports, and costs $150 per year. Larger teams will want to go with their Pro plan, which gives access to 10 users, offers unlimited exports, and costs $950 per year.

Try Stripo via this link.

Subtext

What it’s good for: Engaging directly with readers, Getting readers to support your work

Newsletters are so powerful — but many newsletter operators are starting to think about ways to add text messaging into the mix to engage even more deeply with their audience. If you’re thinking about testing out text messaging or SMS, you might want to take a look at Subtext, which allows you to text your audience. What’s great about Subtext is that readers can write back to you directly — just like when a reader replies to your newsletter, that reply is a 1-1 engagement that the rest of the audience won’t see. 

If you’ve got a paid subscription or membership, you could offer access to an exclusive SMS group as a perk that only supporters get access to. You could also sell subscriptions directly through Subtext — readers on a free newsletter might be willing to pay every month for access to exclusive content or conversations happening in that SMS channel.

Subtext pricing is based on the volume of text messages sent and the length of those texts. Each text segment is a 160-character segment. (A 300-character message, for example, would require two segments). Subtext starts at $650 a month for 20,000 text segments.

Try Subtext via this link.

Vimcal

What it’s good for: Improving productivity

I’ve tested out several calendar apps, but my favorite is Vimcal, which syncs with your calendar of choice, like Google Calendar. It’s got a lot in common with Calendly and Doodle, but with bells and whistles that really appeal to power users. (I swear by their shortcuts. A few times a day, I use their “Time Travel” feature to update a calendar for clients in another time zone.)

If you’re a newsletter operator who regularly schedules meetings with clients or readers, or need to set up scheduling links for interviews, Vimcal can help you set up booking links where people can schedule time with you. And if you need to set up a group voting link to find the right time to meet, Vimcal can do that, too.

It’s free to use the Vimcal app, but if you want to be able to use the desktop version too, that costs $150 per year.

Try Vimcal via this link.

WPForms

What it’s good for: Growing your newsletter list, Gathering data about your readers

WPForms is a tool to create simple forms, like sign-up boxes, that you can deploy on your WordPress site. (One catch: It only works on WordPress sites.) It’s not terribly fancy, but you can download their WordPress plugin and quickly roll out a form on your site to drive sign-ups. It’s also not just for growth — if you want to set up another type of form on your site to collect information about readers or capture potential sponsorship leads, you can design those through WPForms, too. I use it on Inbox Collective, mostly to deploy super simple sign-ups in places like my footer.

You can design forms to look the way you want, but it does require knowing some HTML/CSS to do so.

One advantage of WPForms is the price — it’s a very affordable option. It costs just $49.50 per year to use WPForms on one site. (If you need to use it on three websites, the price is still under $100 per year.)

Try WPForms via this link.

Zapier

What it’s good for: Improving productivity, Connecting different tools

Zapier is a magic little tool that connects the different tools you use. With Zapier, you set the rules: If this happens in one tool, then that should happen in this other tool. It makes moving data from one tool to another super easy — even if those two tools don’t have an integration. I’ve worked with clients to set up all sorts of time-saving workflows (which Zapier calls “Zaps”).

Zapier works with literally thousands of tools — including many of the ones listed in this guide, like Gumroad, Kickbox, Memberful, and OptinMonster — and can connect each of them so you can move data from one place to another or set up automations to help save time. Let’s say you’ve got an Airtable form to capture inbound sponsorship leads. Zapier can monitor that form, and when a new submission comes through, it can send an email or a Slack message to your sales team. Or maybe you’re collecting feedback via a Google Form, and the final question on the survey asks if readers want to sign up for your newsletter. When someone opts in, Zapier can identify those readers and automatically add them to your ESP. 

What’s really impressive about Zapier is how fast it works. In most cases, Zapier will identify that data needs to be moved and then move it, all within a minute or two. You don’t have to go into Zapier and tell it to look for new data — it’ll do it on its own.

Zapier pricing is based on how many times your Zaps run per month. (Each time your Zap runs is called a “task.”) They have a free plan that allows for up to 100 tasks per month. I’m on a plan that allows for up to 750 tasks per month, and that costs about $240 per year. If you needed to run 10,000 tasks per month, that would cost $1,548 per year.

Try Zapier via this link.