LetterDuck vs Buttondown: two indie email tools, compared straight (2026)

Buttondown charges $9 a month for a newsletter of up to 1,000 subscribers, and its pricing page states in plain type that the price assumes at most one email a day and that only active subscribers are billed. We verified both on August 7, 2026 from the page's own structured data and price-selection code. We build a competing product, and both of those are disclosures most vendors leave off the page entirely. Every number below carries the date we checked it.

What each one is

Buttondown is a newsletter tool built the way software used to be built: founded in 2017, self-funded and profitable by its own FAQ's account, renamed from buttondown.email to buttondown.com in 2024, and running on prices set in a public May 13, 2022 repricing post that explained the reasoning. You write in Markdown or rich text, send from your own domain, and get API and SMTP access on every tier including the free one. Paid subscriptions carry no platform percentage, a contrast Buttondown itself draws against Substack's 10 percent cut. Features can even be bought a la carte instead of forcing a tier jump.

LetterDuck is an email workspace on your own domain rather than a newsletter tool. A catch-all routes every address you invent into one threaded team inbox, anyone can reply as any address, and the same workspace sends the newsletter from a designed template. Deliverability is operated, not delegated: SPF, DKIM, and DMARC configured, a warm-up throttle, automatic suppression, and RFC 8058 one-click unsubscribe on every campaign. We run it in production ourselves; a canary probe travels our real inbound path every two hours to prove mail still lands. It costs $50 per domain per month, flat, and it is in waitlist mode. Both tools assume you own your domain; our newsletter on your own domain guide covers why that assumption matters.

What the numbers say in 2026

Public list prices, August 2026, annual billing where offered. Buttondown: Priced in steps by active subscriber count. No annual discount is offered, so monthly is the effective price. LetterDuck is $50 per domain, flat, unlimited addresses and subscribers.

Buttondown's pricing is a pure step function over active subscribers: $0 to 100, $9 to 1,000, $29 to 5,000, $79 to 10,000, $139 to 20,000, then $239 to 40,000 and onward to $459 at 100,000. Between the steps it is remarkably cheap. At the steps it is abrupt: subscriber 1,001 more than triples the bill from $9 to $29, subscriber 5,001 takes it to $79, and 10,001 lands on $139.

LetterDuck is $50 flat per domain on monthly billing, covering unlimited addresses, seats, and subscribers. So the crossover is exact. Below 5,001 active subscribers Buttondown is cheaper for a solo writer; above it the flat rate is, and it never reverses. A 6,000-subscriber list pays Buttondown $79 a month and us $50, a $348 yearly difference. At 20,001 subscribers it is $239 against $50.

Teams move the crossover down. Buttondown gates team seats to Professional at $79 a month, or as a $79 add-on bolted onto a lower tier. A two-person newsletter at 3,000 subscribers pays $29 for Standard plus $79 for teams: $108 a month against $50 flat, a $696 gap over a year, at a list size where Buttondown's subscriber pricing alone would have won.

One more line in their FAQ deserves quoting because most vendors would bury it: prices assume at most one email a day to the whole list, and heavier senders are asked to arrange custom usage-based pricing. That is a fair way to price and it is disclosed up front. LetterDuck has no monthly send cap; the constraint is the warm-up throttle on new domains, our codified version of Resend's documented ramp, about 150 sends on day 1 rising to about 1,100 a day by day 7.

Feature by feature

Choose Buttondown if

• You write alone and your list is under 5,000 subscribers. $9 or $29 a month buys a complete, honest newsletter tool.
• Markdown is your writing environment. Buttondown treats it as the native format, not an import mode.
• You want an API and SMTP access, even on the free tier. Scripting your newsletter is a supported way to use the product.
• You monetize with paid subscriptions and want to keep the platform's hands off the revenue. No percentage cut, unlike Substack's 10 percent.
• You want to pay for exactly one missing feature. The a la carte add-ons (+$9, +$29, +$79 a month) are unique in this market.

Choose LetterDuck if

• Readers reply and somebody has to answer. Every reply, to any address on your domain, threads into one shared inbox anyone on the team can answer from.
• You run more addresses than you have people: editors@, tips@, press@, sponsors@. On Buttondown that is not the product; here an address costs nothing to create.
• Your list is past 5,000, or two people run the operation. Both cross Buttondown's pricing over the $50 line, as the worked examples above show.
• You send more than one email a day across your lists and would rather have a throttle manage the ramp than negotiate custom pricing.
• You want deliverability run as operations you can see: the ramp schedule, the suppression list, the automatic pause at 0.3 percent complaints or 2 percent bounces. This is the shape most newsletter creators grow into once the newsletter becomes a business with correspondence.

Migrating from Buttondown to LetterDuck

Buttondown's concierge migration runs in the other direction, into Buttondown, so leaving is a do-it-yourself job. It is a small one.

1. Export your subscribers from the dashboard as CSV, or pull them through the API, which every tier includes. Get unsubscribed contacts in a separate file.
2. Import active subscribers into LetterDuck contacts. Load the unsubscribed file into the suppression list before your first send; an unsubscribe honored at Buttondown must stay honored here.
3. Add our SPF include and DKIM records in DNS and keep your DMARC record. About 15 minutes plus propagation.
4. Decide what happens to your archive. Buttondown hosts your public back catalog; LetterDuck does not host a public archive site. Keep the Buttondown archive live at its URL, or move the posts to your own site before you cancel.
5. Send, and let the throttle ramp. A list under 2,000 sends in full within the first days; a 5,000-subscriber list spreads across the first week unless your domain is already warm from consistent prior sending.

Realistic total: an hour of export and import, 15 minutes of DNS, and one editorial decision about the archive. The ramp takes about a week to reach 2,000 a day.

Common questions

The short rule to leave with: solo and under 5,000 subscribers, Buttondown; a team, a stack of addresses, or a list past 5,000, LetterDuck at $50 flat. If you are surveying the whole indie field before deciding, our Substack alternatives roundup lines the options up side by side.