08 TOOLS ✣

Newsletter and Content Distribution Tools.

Email remains one of the most reliable channels to reach developers. Algorithmic feeds reorganise, social platforms restrict link distribution, search engines change ranking — but a subscribed inbox is a stable, direct connection. Most s…

ENTRY · 2 MIN · 553 WORDS

Beehiiv

Founded. 2021 by Tyler Denk (formerly Morning Brew).
Strengths. Growth-focused features; native ad network; referral system; integrated landing pages and websites; analytics.
Used by. Modern operator-style newsletters; many DevRel and developer-marketing newsletters launched after 2022.

Substack

Founded. 2017.
Strengths. Zero-setup publishing; direct subscriber monetisation; built-in discovery; long-form post format.
Used by. Many individual technical writers and analysts (Stratechery-style outlets); some DevRel personalities.

Kit (formerly ConvertKit)

Founded. 2013 by Nathan Barry.
Renamed. ConvertKit → Kit in 2024.
Strengths. Creator economy focused; automation/sequence workflows; commerce features for selling courses, ebooks, subscriptions.
Used by. Many individual developer-creators selling courses and content.

SparkLoop

Founded. 2019.
Premise. Newsletter referral and recommendation network. Allows newsletters to recommend each other to subscribers and pay-per-subscriber for paid acquisition.
Strengths. Compounding growth via cross-newsletter promotion; Upscribe paid-recommendation network.
Used by. Most growth-focused newsletters by 2024–2026.

Ghost

Founded. 2013 (Kickstarter-funded).
Open source. Yes; self-hostable. Also hosted as Ghost(Pro).
Strengths. Blogging + newsletters integrated; full content ownership; strong default design; Stripe integration for paid subscriptions.
Used by. Independent technical writers, many media organisations including The Verge after migration, several developer-product blogs.

Buttondown

Founded. 2017.
Indie / developer-friendly newsletter platform.
Strengths. Simple, Markdown-friendly, developer-aesthetic; supports automation, paid subscriptions.

Mailchimp, Brevo (formerly Sendinblue), Mailjet

Mature general-purpose email-marketing platforms. Used by many companies for transactional and marketing email; less feature-tuned for the newsletter use case specifically.

SendGrid, Postmark, Mailgun, Resend

Transactional email infrastructure more than newsletter platforms; relevant when the DevRel team wants to send programmatic email (drip onboarding sequences, lifecycle email).
Resend is particularly developer-friendly and built specifically for this market; founded 2022; popular among modern startups.

DevRel-specific notable newsletters

A representative (not exhaustive) selection of newsletters in the DevRel-and-developer-marketing space:

DevRel Weekly — Mary Thengvall.
DevRel.Agency newsletter — Phil Leggetter’s agency.
DeveloperRelations.com newsletter — Hoopy / Matthew Revell.
Console.dev — Open-source developer tools weekly.
TLDR Newsletter — Daily tech digest.
Pragmatic Engineer — Gergely Orosz; one of the largest paid tech newsletters.
Latent Space — swyx; AI engineering.
Bytes — Cassidy Williams (cassidoo).
JavaScript Weekly, Node Weekly, Python Weekly, etc. — Cooperpress family.
Sentry, Datadog, Cloudflare, Vercel, etc. — Most large dev-product companies operate a flagship developer newsletter.

A short opinionated take:

Cadence matters more than perfection. Weekly beats sporadic.
The author’s voice is the product. Anonymous “Company X News” newsletters underperform named-author newsletters substantially.
Curation beats creation. A weekly curated newsletter of community-relevant links produces more goodwill per labour hour than a weekly original post.
Compound it with SparkLoop or equivalent. Cross-promotion with non-competing developer newsletters is the most effective organic growth channel available.
Open rates are vanity. Click-through to substantive content and downstream activation (signups, trials) are what matter.