2 Minute ServerlessSubscribe

Why we moved off Beehiiv

Short version: same posts, same URLs, faster pages, and the rent went from $59 a month to $0.

What does it cost today?

At roughly 1,000 subscribers, monthly billing:

ItemBeehiiv (before)Now
Website hostingincluded$0 (GitHub Pages)
Newsletter (1,000 subscribers)$59 (Lite)$0 (Kit free)
Domain (serverless.fyi)samesame
Per month$59$0
Per year$708$0

That's $708 a year back. Annual billing on Beehiiv would have been $588 — still not zero.

What happens as the list grows?

Hosted newsletter platforms charge per subscriber. Kit's free plan covers us up to 10,000 subscribers; before then we move email to a self-hosted listmonk server that sends through Amazon SES, which charges per email instead (about $0.10–$0.16 per 1,000). Assuming four issues a month:

SubscribersBeehiiv LiteOur stack
1,000$59/mo$0 (Kit free)
10,000$139/mo≈ $11/mo (listmonk + SES)
100,000$469/mo≈ $60–105/mo
1,000,000enterprise quote≈ $480–790/mo

At 100,000 readers that's about $5,628 a year on Beehiiv versus roughly $720–1,260 self-hosted. The self-hosted numbers are estimates: SES's per-email price is published, the server size is our guess.

What else did we get?

  • Every post is a Markdown file in git — portable, reviewable, ours.
  • All 63 old Beehiiv URLs still work (an automated test checks them on every deploy).
  • Pages score 100 on Lighthouse for performance, accessibility, best practices and SEO.
  • AI agents can read everything: llms.txt, a Markdown copy of every post, andRSS feeds.

What did we give up?

Beehiiv's built-in extras: referral programs, paid subscriptions and its ad network. We used none of them. Kit's free plan adds a small Kit logo to emails and has no automatic post-to-email, so each issue is sent by hand — about two minutes of work, which felt on brand.

Sources

Prices as of October 2026, monthly billing.