I’ve made WordPress themes since 2015. My best-known one, The Fox, is a theme for magazines, news sites and blogs. Over those years I watched the same thing happen again and again: a writer builds a site on WordPress, then starts a newsletter on Substack.
I understand why. Substack makes a newsletter easy. But the writer ends up with two homes. The site has the archive and the search traffic. Substack has the readers. And the readers are the part that matters.
LetterWP is my answer: a newsletter that lives inside the WordPress site you already have.
What was missing
WordPress has newsletter plugins. In the ones I tried, I kept running into two problems:
- Mail sent from the web server. It’s cheap, and it lands in spam.
- Your list kept in someone else’s cloud. You pay per subscriber, and when you leave, you have to ask for your readers back.
Substack has the same second problem, plus a 10% cut of every paid subscription, forever.
Own the data, rent the pipes
LetterWP is built on one rule. Your subscribers live in your WordPress database. Not in a service of ours, and not even in WordPress’s user table: LetterWP keeps them in a table of its own. You can export them whenever you like.
The sending is rented. Emails go out through your own Resend account, from your own domain. Resend is good at getting email into inboxes, and it’s free for up to 1,000 subscribers. We never see your list or your key.
The world changes. Services raise prices, change their rules or shut down. If that happens to the pipe, you swap the pipe. Your readers stay where they are.
What it does today
- Publish a post, and it goes out as an email. Blocks, images, quotes and YouTube videos are turned into email that reads well in Gmail and Apple Mail.
- A subscribe block for any page, with double opt-in. One email confirms the reader and signs them in. No passwords.
- Readers choose topics. Each category is a topic, so a reader can keep Travel and drop Photography.
- One-click unsubscribe. Bounces and spam reports come back to WordPress on their own.
- Results per post: delivered, bounced, spam reports and unsubscribes. No open tracking: your readers aren’t being watched.
- Import and export. A Substack export imports as it is, and unsubscribes stay unsubscribed.
- Email design: fonts, colours and logo, with a live preview.
What it doesn’t do
There are no paid subscriptions yet. They’re on the way. There are no automations, no A/B tests and no growth dashboards. LetterWP does one job: it gets your posts to your readers, and it keeps those readers yours. When someone asks for something new, it has to fit that job before I build it.
If you’re on Substack now
For the first customers, I’ll do the move with you, free: your subscribers, your archive, your domain. Here’s how the move works, or just email me.
LetterWP starts at $49 a year. See pricing.
— Cuong