Exploring Options for Newsletters in a Jekyll-Based Site
Andrew Miracle compares Buttondown and Resend for adding a newsletter to a Jekyll site, weighing workflows, pricing, and setup.
A digital garden thrives on return visitors. RSS covers the technical crowd, but most readers expect email. So: what’s the simplest way to add a newsletter to a Jekyll site without bolting on a CMS?
Two Candidates
After looking around, two services stand out for different reasons:
Buttondown
Buttondown is a small, opinionated newsletter tool built by one developer. The key selling point for a Jekyll workflow: RSS-to-email. Point it at your feed, and new posts automatically become newsletter issues. No extra step in the publishing workflow.
- Markdown-native composing
- Free for up to 100 subscribers — enough to get started and validate
- $90/year scales to 1,000 subscribers, which is a reasonable trade-off for zero maintenance
- RSS-to-email means zero workflow changes — publish a post, subscribers get it
- Built-in subscriber management, analytics, archives
- Paid tiers add custom domains, API access, referral tracking
Resend
Resend is a developer-focused email API. It’s powerful but lower-level — you get full control over every email sent, but you also have to build everything yourself.
- API-driven: send transactional or broadcast emails via REST/SDK
- Beautiful developer experience, good docs
- But: no subscriber management, no opt-in forms, no RSS integration
- You’d need to build: signup form → serverless function → subscriber database → send trigger
- Free tier: 100 emails/day, 3,000/month
Comparison
| Buttondown | Resend | |
|---|---|---|
| Setup effort | Minutes (connect RSS feed) | Hours/days (build full pipeline) |
| Subscriber management | Built-in | DIY (database + API) |
| RSS-to-email | Yes | No |
| Cost (starting) | Free < 100 subs, $90/yr < 1k | Free < 3k emails/mo |
| Control | Moderate | Full |
| Workflow impact | None | Significant |
Leaning Buttondown
For a file-based publishing workflow like Jekyll, Buttondown’s RSS-to-email is the killer feature. Write a post, push to git, Netlify builds, Buttondown picks up the feed — subscribers get an email. No serverless functions, no database, no additional deploy step.
Resend makes more sense if you need transactional emails (password resets, notifications) or want pixel-level control over email templates. For a personal site newsletter, that’s over-engineering it.
Next step: set up Buttondown, connect the RSS feed, and add a subscribe form to the footer.
