For the last decade, email service providers (ESPs) like Kit (formerly ConvertKit), Mailchimp, and others have been the backbone of creator email.
They’re fantastic at:
Capturing subscribers
Sending broadcasts and sequences
Building automations with tags, rules, and funnels
Kit rebranded in 2024 and now offers a generous free “Newsletter” plan for up to 10,000 subscribers, with paid Creator plans unlocking more advanced automations and features.
That’s still incredibly powerful if email is supporting your business: selling courses, coaching, or SaaS.
But in 2025, a big chunk of the fastest-growing creators aren’t just “using email.” They’re building full-blown newsletter-first media businesses.
This shift means the newsletter itself is the main product, requiring infrastructure that has:
A public site with SEO-friendly archives and landing pages
Revenue comes from multiple channels (ads, paid subs, boosts, products, events)
Shared analytics, roles, and workflows, not just one person in an ESP
That’s where platforms like beehiiv come in—not as a replacement for every ESP in every scenario, but as full-stack infrastructure once the newsletter becomes the business.
Public reviews describe beehiiv as a “full-stack platform built for scaling media businesses,” with growth tools (Boosts, referrals), earning (paid subs + ad network), and a built-in publication layer.
Here’s what the founder of The Brink had to say about beehiiv:
Instead of “who’s better,” the more accurate frame is:
ESPs (Kit, Mailchimp, etc.): best at email delivery & automations
Full-stack platforms (beehiiv): best when you want a newsletter-native business with site + growth + earning under one roof
TL;DR
If you’re mainly sending nurture sequences and launch campaigns, an ESP is usually enough.
If your entire brand is built around a newsletter, a full-stack platform tends to carry more of the weight.
Where Email-Only Tools Start To Feel Tight
Here are the friction points creators consistently hit as they scale, regardless of which ESP they started on:
1. Content Is Stuck in the Inbox
ESPs treat each send as “a campaign,” not as part of a public content library.
That means:
No true blog-style archive
Limited or no SEO gains from your best issues
Harder to turn evergreen content into ongoing discovery
With beehiiv, each send automatically becomes a public post with its own URL, lives in an archive, and sits under your custom domain with basic SEO controls.
You stop choosing between “email” and “website”—you get both, synced.
2. Earning Is Narrow
Most ESPs now support:
Paid newsletters/memberships
Digital products (downloads, courses, etc.)
Kit is particularly strong here: you can sell products and paid newsletters directly, and they’ve publicly focused on helping creators earn a living from their audience.
What they typically don’t do is:
Run an ad network for you
Match you with sponsors
Handle paid cross-promotion between newsletters
beehiiv, on the other hand, leans heavily into multi-channel earning:
Paid subscriptions with 0% cut on your revenue (only Stripe fees)
A built-in Ad Network connecting newsletters to 2,000+ advertisers
Boosts, a paid recommendation layer where you get paid for sending new subscribers to other newsletters
So once your thinking shifts from “how do I sell a product?” to “how do I maximize ARPU across ads, subs, and products?”, the all-in-one stack typically creates more surface area.
3. Analytics Move From “What Happened?” to “How Do We Grow?”
ESPs give you:
Open & click-through rates
Unsubscribes
Growth over time
Tag/segment performance
Which is perfect for campaign-level decisions.
Full-stack platforms add questions like:
Which acquisition channel (search, socials, Boosts, referrals) leads to the highest LTV?
Which sponsors perform best with my audience?
How do paid subs + ad revenue + Boosts combine into a predictable revenue model?
beehiiv’s newer reviews emphasize growth-oriented analytics and cohort tracking as a key differentiator versus traditional email tools.
Again, it’s not that ESP analytics are bad. They’re just built for a different job.
Why Trust Me: I’m on the product team at beehiiv, building core features that help creators grow, monetize, and run their newsletter businesses. Outside of work, I love making music, practicing yoga, and traveling.
Signs You Might Be Ready for a Full-Stack Layer
You don’t need to rip out your ESP the second you start a newsletter. In fact, many operators pair tools for a while.
But these are the common “we need more than an ESP” signals:
Your newsletter is your product
You’re not just driving people to YouTube, coaching, or SaaS—the list itself is the business.
You want a public home for your content
You’re sick of “great issues dying in the inbox” and want an archive and SEO-friendly hub.
You want more than just paid subs
You’re thinking about ads, Boosts/cross-promos, paid recommendations, digital products, events, etc.
Your spreadsheet of tools is getting unmanageable
ESP + Webflow/WordPress + referral tool + analytics + sponsor CRM… and you’re done duct-taping.
You’re starting to think in P&L terms, not just “campaigns.”
You care about ARPU, blended revenue, and how to unlock more yield per subscriber.
That’s usually when people start looking at full-stack platforms like beehiiv as the infrastructure rather than just another email sender.
