We launched the first seed of what we now call the Portal back in June of last year. It felt both overdue and clumsy: we wanted to strike a balance between giving subscribers a way to manage their subscriptions and not overwhelming them with too many options, nor forcing ourselves into the revered writer-reader relationship. And we've been slowly adding new functionality to it (like referrals and email address changes) ever since, to the point where it's a pretty full-featured tool for subscribers to manage themselves insteaad of having to reach out to you directly.

But one big flaw remained. In many ways, this flaw is deeply embedded with one of Buttondown's core design decisions, which is to remove ourselves from the conversation between you and your readers as much as possible. We dithered for a long time about whether or not subscribers could or should be able to log into Buttondown directly, and after a long series of internal debates and external gut checks, we have arrived at an answer: yes (the fact that this feature has been soft launched for only a few weeks and already has been used thousands of times indicates we made the right choice). Now, when a subscriber goes to buttondown.com/login and attempts to log in, they'll be directed towards a dashboard containing all of their current and previous subscriptions, as well as links into each individual newsletter that they're subscribed to. Feedback we've gotten from both readers and writers has been frankly exultant, and we feel a little silly having not done this earlier.