Beehiiv for Newsletters: An Honest Assessment

Beehiiv has built a solid newsletter platform with great growth tools. But it comes with trade-offs—shared deliverability infrastructure, escalating costs, and limited customization. Here’s what you need to know before committing.

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What Beehiiv Gets Right

Credit where it’s due—Beehiiv has nailed several aspects of the newsletter experience.

Newsletter-First Design

The entire product is built around newsletters. The editor, analytics, and workflow feel purpose-built for newsletter creators.

Built-in Referral System

Readers can refer friends to earn rewards. It’s a clever growth loop that’s baked into the platform and easy to set up.

Audience Discovery Network

Beehiiv’s recommendation network lets newsletters cross-promote each other, helping creators discover new audiences organically.

Clean Reading Experience

The web-based archive and reading experience is polished. Newsletter issues look good on the web and in email clients.

Where Beehiiv Falls Short

No platform is perfect. Here are the trade-offs you accept with Beehiiv.

Deliverability on Shared IPs

Your emails share infrastructure with thousands of other senders. If others have poor sending habits, your inbox placement suffers too.

Pricing Cliffs as You Grow

Beehiiv’s free plan is generous, but the jump to paid tiers is steep. At 10,000+ subscribers, you’re paying $43–109+/month—and it only goes up.

Limited Customization

You’re limited to Beehiiv’s templates and design options. Deep customization of email layouts or landing pages requires workarounds.

Vendor Lock-in

Your subscriber data, analytics history, and content all live on Beehiiv’s servers. Migrating away means starting over on many fronts.

How Broadcast Handles Newsletters

Everything you need to run a professional newsletter, included in every license

Template Editor

Create beautiful emails without code. Rich text, images, and custom layouts with full control.

Scheduling

Write when inspiration strikes, schedule sends for when your audience is most engaged.

Subscriber Management

Easy import/export, tags, lists, preference handling, and GDPR compliance built in.

Analytics

Track opens, clicks, and engagement. Understand what resonates with your audience.

See all newsletter features in Broadcast →

Newsletter Cost Comparison

Beehiiv charges monthly based on subscriber count. Broadcast is a one-time purchase plus low hosting and sending costs.

Beehiiv

Per-Subscriber Pricing

2,500 subscribers $0/mo (free tier)

10,000 subscribers $43/mo

50,000 subscribers $109/mo

100,000 subscribers $109+/mo

3-year cost at 50k subscribers

$3,924+

Broadcast

Unlimited Subscribers

2,500 subscribers ~$18/mo

10,000 subscribers ~$12/mo

50,000 subscribers ~$30/mo

100,000 subscribers ~$60/mo

3-year cost at 50k subscribers

~$1,230

Save $2,694+ over 3 years

Broadcast costs include: one-time license ($150), hosting (~$6–20/mo), and email sending via Amazon SES (~$0.10/1,000 emails). Beehiiv prices from their published pricing for the Scale plan.

Calculate Your Exact Savings →

Frequently Asked Questions

Beehiiv has a slight edge in built-in growth features like referrals and the recommendation network. But Broadcast matches or exceeds Beehiiv on the core newsletter experience—editing, scheduling, analytics, and deliverability—while giving you full data ownership and dramatically lower long-term costs.

Yes. Export your subscriber list as a CSV from Beehiiv and import it directly into Broadcast. Your subscriber data, tags, and custom fields can all be migrated. Your existing newsletter content would need to be recreated, but your audience comes with you.

Broadcast doesn’t include a built-in referral system like Beehiiv’s. However, since you control the entire platform, you can integrate third-party referral tools or build custom referral tracking. For many newsletter operators, the cost savings from self-hosting outweigh the convenience of a built-in referral feature.