NOTE: you may have signed up to our Buttondown newsletter — we've migrated to use Leaflet's new built-in newsletter feature!

Leaflet: now in your browser, your Bluesky feeds, and your inbox!

We just shipped Newsletter Mode, so your Leaflet publications can now be newsletters, and subscribers can sign up by email whether or not they have an atproto account.

If you're not on the list yet (or are subscribed via atproto) you can head to our Lab Notes homepage and drop your email!

Turning on Newsletter Mode

Newsletter Mode is available with Leaflet Pro.

If you've signed up for Leaflet Pro, you now have the option to enable Newsletter Mode from publication settings.

This is per-publication, so you can do for all your pubs or just one, and you can set a different reply-to email address for each.

Once you do, readers will see an email subscribe form on your publication and posts.

With newsletter mode enabled, the subscribe form defaults to email but subscribers can toggle to atproto-only if they prefer.

When you publish new posts, you can send them as emails, and readers will get them direct-to-inbox with your pub theme, buttons to view online, and all the usual things you expect.

Many of you are reading this post by email; if anything's missing or looks weird in your mail client, please reply and let us know!

Pricing, list imports, and more

A few other important details…and if you have questions not answered here, reach out any time :)

Our initial pricing for email newsletters:

  • Your first 1k email subscribers are included with Leaflet Pro

  • After that, $5/month for each additional 1k email subs

  • We only charge you for months where you actually send emails

So to start, you pay the base Leaflet Pro cost (currently $12/month or $120/year). If you import a list of 5,000 subscribers you'd pay an additional $20/month, but only if you send emails that month.

Want to import an existing list?

Please email us. We're working on UI for that, but for now, glad to do manually.

This is an alpha feature, and we'll keep improving — we'd love your feedback, both as a subscriber and a creator!

To the Atmosphere, and Beyond

One of the first atproto features we launched for Leaflet publications was Subscribing to publications via atproto — we started with atmospheric subscriptions, but always wanted email subs too:

We think both atproto and email subscriptions are important for what we're trying to do — atproto for social stuff; email for direct audience relationship.

While email newsletters come with added costs and complexity, they play an important role for many creators, providing a broadcast channel to make sure readers see when they publish.

We'd love to see something more atmospheric eventually supplant email, but for now, we can mostly get the best of both:

  • Email as direct channel — lowest common denominator that everyone knows how to use, and is also based on an open protocol and portable between tools

  • Atmosphere as the open social layer that makes all kinds of cool features possible — like quote sharing, comments, feeds, and more we haven't built yet!

Readers have an entry point to follow creators with minimal friction. And once subscribed, a simple path to connect to the Atmosphere for things like social recommendations and discovery.

Discovery, in particular, is a separate problem, and a critical one — how do readers find new, interesting, relevant things in the first place? We can't just provide good notification channels, we also have to solve for distribution!

This is an area where atproto holds a lot of promise, and we're already starting to see tools play in this space. We hope to see (and build) more.

And right now, let's use email as a leverage point for bringing more people into the atmosphere and giving them great experiences.

Get started with Leaflet Pro

Want to turn on newsletters for one (or all!) of your publications? Consider signing up for Leaflet Pro!

Right now Pro includes newsletters with up to 1k active subscribers, as well as publication analytics. We have more planned, and would love to hear your top requests as well.

Finally, a celebratory offer for the first Leaflet Lab Notes post to use Newsletter Mode:

The first 10 people to use code LEAFLETTERLAUNCH on signup get Leaflet Pro for $10/month or $100/year ✨

That's it for now, and again please reach out — if you're in your inbox, just hit reply — with any thoughts or questions :)