Built different

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See for yourself:

For most of human history, every family farmed, hunted, sewed, and built for itself. Once we started trading, people could stop doing everything and start getting great at one thing. A fisherman could just fish, a farmer could just farm, and both ended up with more food than either could have produced alone. Adam Smith made this division of labor the central idea of The Wealth of Nations.

A shoemaker could buy a fishing rod, but it wouldn’t make sense. Economists call this comparative advantage: even if you’re capable of doing something yourself, every hour you spend on it is an hour you’re not spending on what you’re actually great at.

Thomas Thwaites put this to the test by building a toaster from scratch. It took nine months, cost 250 times more than the store-bought version, and worked for all of five seconds.

To reiterate: it took him more time and more money to end up with a worse outcome. Just because you can do something doesn’t mean you should. Put that in your back pocket — we’ll come back to it in a moment.

Specialization (and focus) has been behind every category-defining company, from Stripe to Shopify.

When you run your storefront on Shopify, you don’t need to build your own payment infrastructure, host your own website, or think about state-by-state sales tax, VAT in the EU, PCI compliance, chargeback disputes, or fraud.

They have a team of roughly 7,600 people who specialize in e-commerce, payments, checkout, fraud, logistics, and everything else your storefront needs to succeed. They even ship updates that make the software better while you sleep.

You get best-in-class infrastructure for your online store, and no one on your team has to think about it. From that perspective, the $39 per month you’re paying Shopify feels like a steal.

Which is largely the thesis behind my viral post from last week.

Technically, anyone has been able to build their own email infrastructure for decades. The same way anyone could build their own e-commerce storefront. AI just makes it easier, and puts it within reach of people who previously didn’t have the technical chops to do it themselves.

With the help of AI, sure, you could spend thousands of dollars and several weeks building your own email platform, custom-built just for you. But “building it” is the easy part.

The upfront cost is temporary, but the hidden costs compound over time. Rather than waking up to the latest features and security updates, you need to own all of that yourself (forever).

When you want to launch a subscription product or a podcast, enrich your audience data, or set up automated workflows… you’ll need to go back to the well and build and QA each of these features yourself.

When you want to monetize, whether with ads or subscriptions, you’ll need to build your own sales pipeline, plus build (and QA) reporting, user authentication, payment rails, renewal logic, customer alerts, and more.

And when your emails start landing in spam, you’re on your own to figure out deliverability. Good luck!

There’s a common misconception that vibe-coded means free (spoiler: it doesn’t). On top of all the extra work you just took on, you’ll still be paying for every piece of software your setup relies on.

In case you didn’t make it to the bottom of my post on X (I don’t blame you), here are just a few of the expenses you’ll need to cover yourself:

While AI can certainly help you connect everything, you’re still responsible for managing and paying for all of the underlying primitives. And a few of them are ridiculously expensive…

Example 1: We pay an ungodly amount for Cloudflare Enterprise, so every website on beehiiv, including those on custom domains, sits behind the highest level of protection Cloudflare offers. DDoS mitigation, a web application firewall, and bot management run in the background on every site, all the time, and you never have to think about it.

Example 2: Every email address that subscribes to a newsletter on beehiiv passes through three layers of verification before it makes its way onto a list. Two of those layers are proprietary systems we’ve spent the past five years building in-house. The third is a dedicated third-party vendor that costs money to validate each and every email.

Example 3: We pay another vendor hundreds of thousands of dollars per year to verify every single click and separate real human clicks from bots and firewalls. Without it, the click data most email platforms serve you is basically useless.

Paying for any of these yourself would cost more than your beehiiv subscription. But our users benefit from our scale and specialization, and get all of these (and more) out of the box at no extra cost.

They also benefit from our expertise and relationships. Our team has decades of combined experience across email, the creator economy, podcasting, and everything in between. We have direct relationships with every inbox provider, and we attend and sponsor all of the major industry events.

By now you probably understand why I’m not too worried about someone prompting Claude to rebuild our features. What you see from the outside is just the tip of the iceberg.

Again, I’m not saying that you can’t. I’m just saying most people shouldn’t. It’s the toaster all over again: more time and more money for an objectively worse outcome.

But there’s no denying that vibe coding is a real thing, and to be honest, I’m a massive fan. It’s one of my favorite hobbies right now: it’s fun, it’s empowering, it’s super super dope.

Before, most people had no option but to pay for whatever software was available on the market. Today they have a choice…

Option A: Spend the time, money, and labor to build a worse version of beehiiv, then maintain, troubleshoot, and update it on your own forever.

Option B: Pay a small monthly premium to have 130 specialists own all of that for you. That premium comes with regular software updates, access to the latest tools, uptime guarantees, and a team of experts who can help you whenever you need it.

I’m willing to bet my entire career that most people will still choose Option B (assuming, of course, that we keep shipping and innovating with the same intensity we have over the past several years). But that won’t stop people from trying Option A.

A somewhat popular indie hacker recently decided to build his own beehiiv alternative. For context, he made more money last month selling ad space on his body during a HYROX race than from all of his software projects combined.

He shared the results from the first newsletter he sent on his new toy… and I couldn’t have asked for a better advertisement for us:

A 92.9% delivery rate is rough. That means roughly 1 in 14 subscribers never got the email at all (for context, beehiiv’s delivery rate is an industry-best 99.1%). The 3.9% open rate didn’t help either (the platform average on beehiiv is ~41%). Several people replied to the post to say that they never received it, and the lucky ones who did sent screenshots of it showing up broken in their inbox.

Look, I’m sure a couple hundred basement dwellers who treat this guy’s Stripe dashboards like an OnlyFans account will sign up for this thing. Like a cam girl, the demo only has to work once to get paid. But a true category-defining product needs to work reliably, every day, and keep getting better (also every day).

The truth is — no one serious is ever going to use this.

We handle thousands of support tickets every month, have a team of experts helping users grow and succeed, and run a global engineering team across seven time zones that’s on call around the clock.

If email is critical to your business, are you really trusting it to a vibe-coded weekend project? One run solo by a guy who’s also juggling a circus of 38 bastard children masquerading as “startups” (including household names like SuperShrimp and PoopUp).

The only thing these “startups” have in common is that their revenue charts all look like shit. Hint: none of them are going in the right direction.

That said, I’ll gladly take all the free marketing and attention he’s giving us. We had a record week last week for both revenue and growth. In fact, yesterday (Monday) was one of our best revenue days of 2026.

For those of you at home who may be confused… this is what a revenue chart is supposed to look like:

And we’re just getting started. Some of our biggest product bets are still ahead of us, scheduled to ship later this quarter. It’s full steam ahead, baby, and I can’t wait to see what our users build with what’s next.

Word to the wise: don’t conflate social media followers with competence.

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