A quick heads-up: we've moved three features behind the paywall, which means new accounts will need to be on a paid plan to use them. Those features are metadata, the ability to customize transactional emails, and integrations.

What changes for you

First, the most important thing. If you're reading this and feeling a little pang of "wait, did Buttondown just take away something I rely on?" — no, we didn't. If you find that's not the case for you, please email support and we'll get it sorted out.

Why we're doing this

Rather than walking through each of these three features one by one, I think it's more honest to talk about them as a group, because the reasoning is the same for all three. All of them are what I'd perhaps inelegantly describe as power user functionality. If you care about customizing the exact copy of your confirmation emails, or piping subscriber data into a Zapier workflow, or storing arbitrary metadata to segment your subscribers — you're someone who cares deeply about the experience of your newsletter, and you're probably trying to accomplish something non-trivial with it rather than just sending updates to friends and family.

That's genuinely great, and we want to keep building things for folks who care at that level. But these features come with a real cost on our end: not just the engineering labor to build them, but the ongoing upkeep in the form of infrastructure, support tickets, and documentation. If these specific features are valuable to you (and I agree — they are!), then hopefully Buttondown itself feels valuable enough to warrant being on a paid plan.

Feedback? Angst? Questions?

As always, if any of this is confusing or you think we've made a mistake in how we've drawn the line, just reach out.