No team can do it alone. Here's every tool, service, and open-source project that powers Buttondown — and what we give back.
Buttondown, like all software companies, sits on the shoulders of giants. We're committed to donating 10% of all profits to open source technologies that power our software, and we're proud members of FOSS Funders and signatories of the Open Source Pledge.
We also maintain a number of our own open-source packages, born out of needs we encountered building Buttondown and released for the community to use and contribute to.
The most important resource I have is my energy, and being able to trade X dollars (where X is any number less than a hundred) for even trivial amounts of energy is an absolute no-brainer.
When I launched Buttondown, AWS Simple Email Service was notoriously low-quality and Postmark did not support broadcast emails. Mailgun was the choice I went with, and there are still many customers using Mailgun's rails who have custom domain records set up that I don't have the heart (or incentive) to migrate.
I like having redundancy — if one provider were to go down or drastically change rates it would be trivial for me to migrate — but if I were starting Buttondown from scratch I would likely just have everything run through Postmark.
Some specific choices I made to roll my own:
| Date | Change |
|---|---|
| 2026-06-19 | Removed UptimeRobot — TLS monitoring now run off our in-house checker framework. |
| 2026-06-12 | Added ClickHouse ($5/mo) for archival storage. |
| 2026-06-05 | Added UptimeRobot (Solo plan) for uptime monitoring. |
| 2026-06-02 | Removed Goto — still a great tool, but we've replaced it with individual usage. Also dropped Sender Score, which never gave us useful feedback. |
| 2026-05-22 | Removed Redis Enterprise Cloud; caching and rate limiting now run off Postgres. |
| 2026-05-14 | Stopped using Blacksmith for CI; moved all GitHub Actions workflows to self-hosted runners. |
| 2026-04-03 | Added Proximo ($5/mo) for outbound HTTP proxying. |
| 2026-03-21 | Removed Anymail in favor of bespoke SMTP backends. We've moved sufficiently far away from it that it no longer makes sense, but we'd still recommend it. |
| 2026-03-21 | Added disposable-email-domains to the stack; donating $10/mo. |
| 2026-03-19 | Churned from S3 in favor of Cloudflare R2. |
| 2026-03-18 | Churned from Better Stack in favor of using Sentry's logging + uptime monitoring. |
| 2026-03-04 | Downgraded Pulumi Cloud from paid to free tier. |
| 2026-03-01 | Churned from Better Stack to incident.io for incident management. |
| 2026-02-20 | Stopped using Tailscale. Great service, we just didn't need it. |
| 2026-02-16 | Stopped using HEX for data notebooks. |
| 2026-02-13 | Stopped using Obsidian for internal documentation. |
| 2026-01-31 | Stopped using DNSimple for DNS management. |
| 2026-01-25 | Stopped using ImprovMX for email forwarding. |
| 2026-01-22 | Migrated from Amazon RDS to Planetscale. Removed Iframely and Granola. |
| 2025-12-26 | Replaced Vista Social with Buffer for social media management. |
| 2025-12-23 | Replaced Vercel Analytics with Seline for website analytics. |
| 2025-12-19 | Added StopForumSpam for spam detection (free!). |
| 2025-12-08 | Published our year-end stack roundup. |
| 2025-12-04 | Removed Vista Social, Quickbooks, and Valtown from the stack. |
| 2025-12-01 | Stopped using Mimestream for email. |
| 2025-11-24 | Stopped using Groove for customer support. |
| 2025-11-01 | Added Pulumi for infrastructure as code. |
| 2025-10-21 | Added Have I Been Pwned for breach detection (removed 2026-04). |
| 2025-08-01 | Added Bunny (DNS), CleanShot (screenshots), Granola (notetaking), and Sendgrid (SMTP) over the summer. |
| 2025-05-14 | Started using Vista Social to manage social media accounts and Tailscale to manage the server storing internal docs. Stopped using Trotto (in favor of Tailscale's own OSS version). |
| 2025-04-01 | Replaced Depot with Blacksmith (faster, cheaper) |
| 2025-01-09 | So much stuff we had to write a whole blog post about it! |
| 2024-07-10 | Started using Depot to speed up GitHub Actions |
| 2024-07-09 | Started using Fivetran and Metabase to analyze data and construct a (janky, but useful!) WBR |
| 2024-04-03 | Started using Mercury as a banking solution |
| 2024-03-28 | Added Pika, Cloudflare, and a handful of other tools; churned from Texts, Sketch, Bear, and Imgix. |
| 2024-03-14 | Added Audiogest to the stack. It's a nice little tool! |
| 2023-10-13 | Had to bump up my Imgix plan from $75 to $200/mo because of traffic. Time to find something cheaper! |
| 2023-08-22 | Added val.town |
| 2023-08-01 | Add PopSQL (which technically I've been using for a while but forgot about) |
| 2023-07-25 | Migrated off of Heroku Redis and onto Redis Enterprise Cloud, which means saving $70/mo for five minutes of switching environment variables. |
| 2023-07-24 | Onboarded to Calibre. |
| 2023-07-23 | Purchased a reserved instance for my big ol' RDS database, saving $110/mo. |
| 2023-07-20 | Initial launch of this page. |
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