r/beehiiv

Just hopped into our beehiiv account to create our newsletter for tomorrow morning.

We're a local newsletter who do a main weekend issue on a Thursday, and a lighter-weight issue on Monday.

We're just over six months in.

We found the beehiiv editor so dreadful to use - formatting all over the place - that we developed some plugins for our WordPress site to spit out HTML content that we copy and pasted into HTML snippets in the newsletter.

We weren't doing anything fancy with these; it just meant we could have consistent-looking text throughout our newsletter.

I've logged in today to see that HTML snippets have been removed from the free tier. That strikes me as a really shitty way of going about things. Introducing new functionality and making it for paid tiers feels totally reasonable, but removing something like this, is just really, really poor.

My immediate problem is getting a decent-looking newsletter cobbled together, essentially from scratch, in the next few hours.

Beyond that, though, we have just crossed 2,000 subscribers and will be approaching moving to a paid tier soon, but this kind of awful way of treating customers will has us looking elsewhere.

Really poor beehiiv - really, really poor.

Hi everyone,

I want to start with something that often gets lost in pricing discussions. Beehiiv takes 0% of our subscription revenue. That's a big deal and a real advantage over platforms that take a cut of every sale, and I don't take it for granted.

I'm posting because I've been reading many threads from people who shared frustrations and experiences after the recent plan changes. I noticed a pattern that I think explains some of the friction, and I'd love the team's view on it.

Beehiiv has been shipping a lot of new features, which is great. But every new vertical makes it harder to fit everything into a handful of all-in-one plans. The plans get heavier with features, while the individual limits on each feature get thinner. As more products launch, I think this tension will only grow.

Community is a good example. It's a great addition to the product, but it takes real ongoing effort to keep a community engaged. Many people running large, established newsletters may never use it. They still pay for it as part of their plan, while the limits on the things they do use get tighter.

So I've been wondering whether Beehiiv has considered a modular model:

• Core plan: newsletter + website, the heart of the product.
• Optional add-ons that each project turns on as needed, for example:
  • AI
  • Podcast
  • Community
  • Digital products
  • (and future verticals)

Because each add-on would be sold on its own instead of a little bit of everything bundled together, each one could come with more generous limits for the people who actually need it. A podcaster could get a solid podcast module without paying for community. A large newsletter could stay lean on the core and only add what it uses.

Other platforms already work this way. HubSpot sells separate "Hubs" (Marketing, Sales, Content, etc.) that you combine as needed. Squarespace sells Email Campaigns as an add-on on top of the website plan. Zoom sells things like Webinars and Large Meetings as add-ons to its base plans. It's a familiar model for customers.

I'm not saying this is definitely the right answer. There may be good reasons it doesn't work for Beehiiv, such as billing complexity, how features depend on each other, or the economics. I'd really like to know whether the team has considered it, and if so, why it did or didn't make sense.

Thanks everyone!

Hey everyone. I'm new to BeeHiiv and digital monetization in general. I've always loved writing and finally in that era.

However, I'm torn on how to generate revenue from writing. Are most of you using paid subscriptions? Do you also sell digital products? Would love to hear all the ideas.

Hey, I'm not sure who might be at the root of this, or who might be able to help with it inside of the beehiiv ecosystem, but there have been a lot of increased MCP connection failures inside of ChatGPT of late. Like, a LOT more.

Enough that the feature probably is only working about 65% of the time. I'm having to switch over to cloud browser access to do what I want to do. And that's fine, since it gets done, but it's kind of negating what WAS one of your most awesome features for us to date.

I'll be looking into the option of write API access, now that it's approved for MAX users (big thanks for that, by the way) but I'm just wondering if this is an isolated event to me, to just ChatGPT or if it's becoming endemic across all connectors and all platforms.

To be fair to you, Canva and the Cloudflare connectors constantly give me issues as well.

Just wanted to see if this is on anyone else's radar right now?