Buttondown
beehiivYou hit send on Buttondown. Then you do the thing every newsletter writer does. You open the subscriber page, and an hour later you open it again.
The number is the scoreboard. It’s also buried two clicks deep in an app you only open to write.
What the board shows
Subscribers: your count as a big number, on the board you already keep open. The board keeps its readings, so a line grows under it from the day you add it, with the change over 24 hours, 28 days or a year.
Your latest issues: Buttondown gives every archive an RSS feed. Paste it into Connect and your last few issues sit in a feed widget beside the count.
A goal: point a goal ring at the same number. 3,000 by December, 10,000 by next summer, whatever you’re aiming at.
Beside it: the business the newsletter feeds. Your Lemon Squeezy or Stripe revenue, your archive’s visitors from Plausible, and the to-do list for the next issue.
Where the numbers come from
The board reads your subscriber count from Buttondown’s API with a key you save once in Connect. The key is sealed on the board’s server and never shown again. It only goes to Buttondown’s API, and only on requests that read, so the board can’t add a subscriber, send an email or touch a draft.
The count is the subscribers Buttondown types as regular, the everyday free list. Unsubscribed, undeliverable and unactivated readers each have a type of their own, so none of them pad the number.
While the board is open, it reads the count again about once an hour. Close it and it waits until somebody opens the board again. If a read fails, the widget keeps the last count it got and says what went wrong and when.
Planning a launch? The Launch week template has a subscribers goal and a subscribers chart on it already. Connect Buttondown from either one and both fill in, because they read the same number.