By now, you're probably aware that in three weeks' time, Mailchimp will be automatically using your data — your customers, your content, your everything — to power their generative AI products:

We may use your Inputs and Outputs, including Customer Data, for machine learning purposes in order to develop and improve the AI Model, the Services, and similar products and features, and you instruct us to process Customer Data for such purposes.

(There's no opt-out, of course; the only opt-out is to stop using Mailchimp, and to delete your data.)

I'm no Luddite: I think whether you want to call it an "LLM" or "generative AI" or "GPT", the products and technologies that seem to be taking over the world are legitimately useful and cool.

But "useful" and "cool" do not outweigh privacy concerns. Nor do they outweigh your right as a user to decide what companies you trust get to do, not just with your data but with your customer's data.

Buttondown takes that trust seriously, and considers it a sacred responsibility to be a good steward of your data.

That's why we're the only newsletter tool that offers opt-in tracking, not opt-out. We don't gather any data unless you explicitly ask us to, and we certainly won't be feeding it into any other newsletters or black-box AIs without you knowing it.

If you're a happy Mailchimp user, no hard feelings! But if you've been frustrated by some of their changes over the years — the price increases, the complicated UI, the sale to Intuit — and this is the straw that broke the camel's back, send me an email. I'd be happy to personally onboard you onto a platform that respects your privacy.

(Oh, yeah, and we're cheaper than Mailchimp, too.)