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Substack or Revue?
by
Dewane Mutunga
Which do you prefer and why?
#ask-ih
I work in this space. I built Goodbits.io, it was the first service to save links with a chrome extension and build quick email newsletters. Then came Revue, then Substack. Revue is very much similar to Goodbits with link saving and supports automatic sources to collect content, looks very clean and has neat landing pages.
Substack doesn't have any features to queue up links you want to share from what I last saw. It's more tinyletter style. In the way you write long form emails. So if time saving is important to you Revue/Goodbits could help you. The same applies to automatically saving links from services like Buffer, Slack, etc. You can compare what Revue offer and Goodbits.
If you're looking to make money then the pricing models will be different for the amount you scale your subscriptions. At Goodbits I chose to not couple the growth of your subscribers. I have customers like Music Geeks (https://musicgeeks.co/) who makes 100% of the subscriptions they have set up, setup the landing page with https://carrd.co/ to take stripe payments and push subscribers to MailChimp.
At Goodbits I'm pretty much focussed on the workflow of creating the email newsletter, allowing for more customizable landing pages. There's a custom template engine and the ability to send your final email with the cheapest email sending provider out there. Other sending providers like MailChimp will always be better for sustainable email deliverability.
It mainly comes down to rating what is important to you, the budget you want to apply and your needs. Feel free to ping me, I'm happy to share more.
Hi and thanks for having created this tool.
I've tried almost all.
Goodbits is the most flexible builder to me, and also remains affordable. But the builder UX is a bit too complicated when you just want to share a bunch of links. Also the " image/text extractor" is not the best one, but the rest looks great to me.
Curated.co is an all-in-one solution that seems very nice when what you really want is to share links. It's less flexible but goes the extra mile by a more simpler newsletter builder, managing subscriptions, sending actual emails and managing sponsorship. But... pricing is hard and not very scalable. Not even sure to break even if I actually get a sponsor :)
Revue looks in-between. Not as customizable as GoodBits, but more simple, and manage subscribers/sending emails. Pricing is more affordable but increase with audience size. Can provide a paid newsletter, but free newsletter with sponsorship.
Elink is another tool I liked. The cllipper/builder is nice and simple. But it does not look like really tailored for weekly newsletter, you don't get any archive page, it's more "export your email and continue your workflow on Mailchimp"
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For my usecase, which is basically creating a newsletter from daily LinkedIn posts + a few extra links, I'd probably go with Curated if it was more affordable.
But as it's not I'm likely going with Revue, which remains simple for my usecase and is more affordable.
I like Goodbits but the extension does not work so well with my datasources like Twitter or LinkedIn due to code not loading because of Content-Security-Policies. Other extensions do not load remote code so they work.
Also the extractor of Goodbits was not good enough for my datasources compared to alternatives. (I'd recommend taking a look at diffbot.com for that)
Love to talk to you about optimizing my Substack newsletter. https://snarkysenior.substack.com. I'm a writer and not great at software. Please take a look. Maybe we can work together. How much do you charge? I'd like to move to subscription model at some point but just getting started. I'm Erica Manfred at askerica@gmail.com.
I really appreciate you sharing this. I took some time to check out Goodbits but I'm honestly still not clear about how it works. Would love to gain some clarity. It looks really interesting!
I've used them all - as Kalv noted below I use Goodbits.io now for two main reasons, a) the newsletter I run is a curated one, so I wanted a chrome extension to pipe content in and b) the newsletters I run are paid, so I'm comparing pricing models with that in mind.
If you're interested in a free newsletter, I'd say Substack or Mailchimp is your best bet. Substack for purely written content, Mailchimp if you need something a bit more robust/flexible.
If your newsletter will be paid, I'd say look into Mailchimp+Goodbits Builder+Carrd Landing Page, or Revue. I did some pricing comparisons here [I believe it's accurate but make no promises]: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1g25QYERuCwvfrwr9FfUukxbckuriEal8E7P3BrrpIRo/edit?usp=sharing
Thanks for sharing! This spreadsheet is very helpful.
Uhm... I use Substack for my PAID newsletter :D
Recently came across Substack and Revue. Are they a better option than sending newsletters directly via let's say sendgrid or mailhcimp
As per revue -
Revue is mostly aimed at publishers whereas Substack has a lot of individual users. Revue does support paid newsletters, but also other business models such as sponsors or ads.
Here is the tweet by revue - https://twitter.com/revue/status/1140260972403159041
This comment was deleted 4 years ago