· Posted on X by Marc Lou @marclou

Bye bye Beehiiv: Marc Lou vibe-codes his own newsletter platform

Beehiiv raised prices for the third time in two years, so Marc Lou fired back with a few prompts in Opus 5.5. His homemade newsletter platform has campaign management with an editor, web archives, an API, list cleanup and deliverability reports, running on AWS SES and MongoDB. His first yearly Beehiiv bill was $1,000 and the next would have been $4,000; now he expects to pay under $300 a year. A cron job marks inactive subscribers as dormant instead of paying per head for them. Resend, at $400 a month, is next on his list. Reloading.

Saving, as stated by the author: a future $4,000/year bill vs under $300/year

Bye bye Beehiiv 👋

I vibe-coded my own newsletter platform:

📧 Campaign management w/ editor
🖥️ Web archives (http://newsletter.marclou.com)
🔗 API support
🫧 List cleanup, deliverability reports

It took a few prompts with Opus 5.5.

I left Beehiiv because they raised prices for the 3rd time in 2 years.
- My first yearly bill was $1,000.
- My future bill would have been $4,000.

Now I'm using AWS SES + MongoDB, and I will pay less than $300/year.

Newsletter platforms charge per subscriber, when in fact the real cost is the number of emails sent. Subscribers will naturally become inactive, so you end up paying more for something that hurts your deliverability (sending to dormant subscribers = spam trap).

So I've set a cleanup cron job for my newsletter alternative. It marks inactive subs as dormant, sends one last re-engaging email, and stops emailing them. Money saved. Deliverability increased.

I also gain a priceless feature: Freedom. I can change the UI, add features, connect all my apps - anything is possible with just a prompt.

I'm replacing Resend next. I love it, but it's very expensive ($400/mo)

— Marc Lou, read the original on X

More SaaS obituaries

All news →