As an SEO writer and content creator, I’ve tried various tools to grow my email list. With so many options out there, it can feel pretty overwhelming.
I actually grew my beehiiv newsletter to over 3,000 subscribers at one point, but later did a big cleanup and brought it down to about 1,200 active readers.
I did it because having a bunch of inactive subscribers doesn’t help.
My email marketing journey started back in 2020 when I launched my first newsletter on Mailchimp. A few years later, I switched to Kit (formerly ConvertKit) because it felt simpler to use and had helpful features for creators.
Even then, I got stuck at around 2,000 subscribers and couldn’t figure out how to actually earn money from a newsletter without adding a ton of extra work.
Then beehiiv showed up with some amazing monetization features built for creators (I break those down in this article). I switched from Kit to beehiiv and honestly haven’t looked back.
In this beehiiv review, I’ll walk you through my experience using beehiiv for 3 years, how it works, and how you can monetize your newsletter on beehiiv even if you only have around 1,000 subscribers.
I’ll also show you exactly how much I’ve made from the beehiiv Partner Program, boosts, and sponsored ads.
P.S. This post includes a few affiliate links. If you decide to try beehiiv, I may earn a small commission at no extra cost to you. Just being transparent! I only recommend tools I’ve personally used and genuinely believe in. 
My honest beehiiv experience
I made the switch from Kit (formerly ConvertKit) to beehiiv in January 2024.
The biggest reason?
Kit just didn’t have the monetization options I was looking for, while beehiiv made it a clear selling point.
As a content creator with a small email list, I needed a simple, low-effort way to make money from my newsletter.
I didn’t want to hunt for newsletter sponsors. Instead, I wanted a setup where they’d come to me with offers. Plus, I was keen on promoting other newsletters to earn passive income without breaking a sweat.
So far, it’s paying off with beehiiv.
Beehiiv sends me 3 to 6 sponsorship opportunities every month, with sponsors compensating me based on clicks and views. On top of that, I’ve activated boosts for my newsletter, earning $1 to $3 for each referred subscriber.
Here’s what I achieved with beehiiv in 2025:
- Newsletters written: 75
- Average open rate: 68.8%
- Average CTR: 3.3%
- Email list: 1,300 subscribers
- Earnings from subscriptions: $392
- Earnings from ads: $138
- Earnings from Boosts: $328
- beehiiv Partner Program earnings: $6,516.89
And this doesn’t even include any product or service sales I’ve made through my newsletter.
This really is effortless cash I wouldn’t have made if I’d used any other email software. All I had to do was accept ad offers and insert those ads into my weekly newsletter.
Low effort, big return.
I promise, this isn’t me trying to brag.
I’m just sharing what’s possible for a small content creator using beehiiv.
Plus, I’ve earned over $12,000 through the beehiiv Partner Program simply by sharing my experience with the platform. If you want more details, I cover that in the article, too.
beehiiv has definitely been a win for me this year, even though I put almost no effort into growing my email list. In August 2024, I even cut my subscriber list nearly in half, down to 1,200, to boost my performance stats. I set up an automation to remove inactive subscribers, which actually worked in my favor.
Here’s my most recent performance update as of March 2026:
I send out newsletters every week, always aiming to bring more value to my audience, mainly SEOs and content creators. Looking at the performance data, there’s massive potential to grow and earn even more if I commit a bit more time to growing my email list.
I’ve had a pretty good experience with beehiiv, but let’s be honest: no platform is flawless. There are definitely some ups and downs.
Here’s what I’ve found are the key pros and cons of using beehiiv:
Pros and cons at glance
Pros:
- Tons of ways to monetize your content as a creator
- You can even make money from small email lists, starting at just 1,000 subscribers
- The option to build your own website and keep your content as blog posts—here’s my website on beehiiv as an example
- Detailed analytics reports that break down user acquisition and performance
- The ability to create a referral program to help grow your newsletter audience
Cons
- The wide range of features can feel a bit overwhelming when you’re just getting started
- Ad requests might be completely irrelevant to your niche at times
- No option to send newsletters based on your subscribers’ time zones
- Building custom pages isn’t as intuitive as you might hope
- Setting up a freebie page with a subscription form can be tricky at first
- There’s no built-in integration with Gumroad
Those are the main pros and cons I’ve noticed from my experience. Even though the learning curve felt steep when I switched from Kit (which was simpler), I’m convinced I made the right choice.
Beehiiv keeps getting better, rolling out new features and improving what’s already there at an impressive pace.
If you’re still on the fence about whether beehiiv is right for you, read his beehiiv overview—I’ve got more insights coming up.
What does beehiiv actually do?
beehiiv is a newsletter growth platform launched in 2021 by Benjamin Hargett, Jacob Hurd, and Tyler Denk, who was formerly a product manager at Google.
The founders claim that the primary goal of the platform is to help you easily build, grow, and monetize your newsletter.
Beehiiv is positioned as “the most creator-friendly newsletters platform.” However, many other newsletter platforms also have a clear UI and powerful functionality.
So, what’s special about beehiiv?
Here is how Tyler Denk, the platform co-founder, explains it:
Who is beehiiv best for?
Beehiiv has been operating for four years and has already made so much buzz on the web and X (former Twitter) to attract novice and well-established creators.
Here’s who I believe will benefit from using beehiiv email software:
1. Beginners
If you want to start a newsletter from scratch and don’t want to invest any money at the beginning, you can use beehiiv. It’s free to use for up to 2,500 subscribers.
Additionally, you can send unlimited email campaigns and grow your newsletter for free with beehiiv’s recommendation network.
Paid plans start at $49/month and come with a 30-day free trial, which is enough to understand whether the tool works for you.
2. Creators with small email lists
I’ve already mentioned that beehiiv is free to start with.
However, if you already have an audience of up to 1,000 subscribers, you can start monetizing your newsletter with beehiiv’s ad program and boosts.
I made roughly $92 monthly on beehiiv in my first 10 months, which is absolutely realistic with a small email list.
3. Creators who don’t know how to monetize their newsletter
I’ve been such a creator for a long time because I didn’t have time to manage my newsletter properly and prepare salesy email campaigns.
I didn’t want to dig into details. Instead, I wanted to have quick and simple solutions to monetize my newsletter.
If you don’t offer any products or services to sell but still want to monetize your newsletter, you can do it hustle-free with beehiiv’s ad network and boosts (more about it later in this article).
4. Creators willing to switch but don’t want to lose all their setups
I know content creators who are open to switching to another email software, like beehiiv, but don’t want to set up their complex automations from scratch.
To my knowledge, beehiiv offers a smooth and quick transition for creators switching from Substack, Revue, WordPress, Ghost, and Mailchimp. If you manage a big email list, you can also reach out to the beehiiv’s support team and ask for custom assistance.
You can learn more about migrating your newsletter to beehiiv in this video:
How to set up beehiiv
It took me some time to learn beehiiv’s features and functionality. However, I’m honestly satisfied with their powerful toolkit for content creators.
Let me show you how beehiiv works and what I use it for.
As soon as you join beehiiv, you’ll be redirected to the dashboard, where you can see your subscribers’ statistics and the overall performance of your email campaigns from the last 24 hours up to the last 12 months.
Below, you can see the number of active subscribers on my beehiiv account — 1,364 subscribers.
You can also see the average open and click rate from the past 12 months — 64.23% open rate and 3.86% click-through-rate.
All your published posts on beehiiv will be in chronological order in the top right corner. It’s very convenient if you want to quickly check them.
You can also see a beehiiv’s notification that I have one pending ad sponsorship request that I haven’t checked yet. The pop-up will remain until I accept the ad request or until it expires.
Overall, I use the beehiiv dashboard to quickly review my stats and the performance of my recent newsletters.
How to create a subscribe form
If you are new to beehiiv and wonder how to start, I recommend the following steps:
- Create a subscribe form to capture email addresses
- Create a beehiiv-hosted website to publish your newsletters
- Customize a website
- Create a newsletter template
- Customize a newsletter design
- Create a lead magnet page on beehiiv
- Set up automation
- Turn on beehiiv monetization
Does it sound like a lot of work?
Not really!
I spent several days moving my newsletter to beehiiv, creating landing pages for lead magnets, and setting up the automation.
Let me show you how to create a subscribe form on beehiiv.
Navigate to Audience → Subscribe Forms →Create a new form
You have to come up with the headline, write a description, create a call-to-action (CTA), and upload the logo. Besides, consider what you want your subscribers to see or do once they join your email list. You can show them a success message or redirect them to another page.
Once you are done, hit “Save.”
The beehiiv’s subscribe form design is very simple and has limited customization. You can change the button colors and copy.
However, that’s pretty much it. Anyway, it works well to capture new email addresses.
Beehiiv offers several types of forms depending on your needs: full width, fixed width, slim embed (email field only, without header, background, or description), and advanced configuration with attribution tracking.
You can embed it anywhere, including a website or Medium posts, which is an excellent opportunity to grow your email list.
Here’s what my beehiiv’s subscribe form looks like in action:
How to build a landing page
If you wonder, “How do I create a landing page on beehiiv?” Let me show you step-by-step how.
I believe it’s one of the best beehiiv features, with many customization opportunities for content creators.
Navigate to Design → Website Builder → Custom pages (pick from the drop-down menu) → Custom Pages → Internal Page
In my opinion, it is one of the most frequently used features.
You can create pages on beehiiv to publish content, sell products, and promote your freebies.
In a way, beehiiv can replace a standard website you’d have to create otherwise.
It took me a few hours and a friendly chat with the beehiiv support team to understand how to create and customize a landing page with a subscribe form.
Here’s how you can do it:
- Create a subscribe form
- Create a customized page to download your product
- Embed the subscribe form
- Save the page
- Create a thank you page with a thank you message
- Create an automation that will send users a welcome email after the subscription
Here’s what the simplest landing page looks like on beehiiv, where I encourage users to download my case study:
Furthermore, I use a thank you page to promote other beehiiv creators and make money through boosts.
The first three recommendations are boosts, which means I’ll make money if my subscribers join other creators’ email lists.
Beehiiv often pays $1–$3 per subscriber, making it an excellent way to earn extra money online.
Alright, I’ve shown you how to create a subscribe form and a custom page on beehiiv.
What’s next?
The next step is to learn how to write a newsletter.
A big button, “Start writing,” in the top-right corner of the creator dashboard will redirect you to the content editor, where you can create a post, an email, or a beehiiv SEO optimized website page.
How to write your first newsletter
In the example below, I used a content editor to draft an email. It’s incredibly user-friendly.
You can use the beehiiv content editor to:
- Create and publish posts on your beehiiv website
- Create and send newsletters
- Publish newsletters on your beehiiv website
You can also use the content preview feature to see how your content will look after it is published or sent via email.
I believe beehiiv is a fantastic newsletter platform for anyone launching an online business. It offers many essential features at no cost, allowing content creators to “try out” the platform before committing to a paid plan.
Plus, beehiiv includes a range of features that can benefit both newcomers and experienced creators with large email lists.
How to make money on beehiiv
According to the Litmus guide, email drives an ROI of $36 for every dollar spent, which is higher than any other channel.
This is mindblowing information indicating the massive potential of newsletters for content creators!
Let me share a few proven-to-work methods for monetizing your email list and making money with beehiiv.
1. The beehiiv Partner Program
The beehiiv Partner Program is one of the best ways to earn money beehiiv has made for content creators.
The logic is simple:
- Create an account with beehiiv
- Promote beehiiv among your target audience
- Earn 50% commission from every sale during the first year for referring new paid customers to beehiiv
As of March 2026, I’ve made over $12,000 from the beehiiv Partner Program.
I’ve been using my Medium blog and this post to spread the word about the platform, and the results look really promising!
Beehiiv pays your commissions directly to your PayPal account each month, but keep in mind that this is the only way to receive your affiliate earnings.
2. Earn with beehiiv Boosts
Boosts is another way to grow your email list faster and create an additional revenue source.
For those looking to grow an email list faster, beehiiv offers an opportunity to promote your newsletter among thousands of qualified beehiiv newsletters to reach your target audience.
According to the beehiiv boosts page, the average cost of one active subscriber is $1.63.
If you want to monetize your newsletter on beehiiv, you can apply to boost other newsletters and get paid for every new subscriber. Please note you’ll have to set up a Stripe account to get your earnings.
Beehiiv’s boosts marketplace provides many opportunities for your consideration. If you believe you can help other creators grow their email lists, send an application and explain why your newsletter is a good fit.
You can send a maximum of 25 boost offers per month. However, beehiiv will only show up to 3 boosts at a time.
Besides making money by referring new subscribers, there’s one more boost type called “Earn per send.” It means you can also make money by featuring other creators’ newsletters in your newsletter. Some creators pay up to $1,000 per send!
Can you imagine making up four figures by sending just one sponsored newsletter? It’s possible with beehiiv boosts!
You can learn more about making money with Boosts in this video.
3. The beehiiv Ad Network
The beehiiv ad network is a way for creators to connect with premium brands and earn revenue by featuring ads in their newsletters. The network matches brands with newsletters based on audience demographics and interests so that the right people see ads.
You must have more than 1,000 subscribers and be actively sending emails to join the beehiiv ad network.
Once approved, you’ll receive inbound ad opportunities from the beehiiv team. You can choose to accept or decline any ad, and you’ll be paid a portion of the ad revenue based on the number of clicks or views.
Here’s my experience with the beehiiv ad network.
When I joined beehiiv, I had 2,000+ subscribers. I’ve sent a few newsletters and set up my beehiiv newsletter.
I thought I’d need time to earn credibility on the platform before I’d get any offers from advertisers. Surprisingly, I was wrong!
By my third week on beehiiv, I received three sponsored ad requests!
Here’s what the ad request looks like on my dashboard.
In 2025, I ran 29 ads (in comparison, I ran 37 ads in 2024 and made $632.02) for various companies.
Overall, I’ve made $138 from the beehiiv Ad Network by simply embedding the ad into my weekly newsletter.
My best-performing ad campaign made me $112, got 35 clicks, and had a 4.5% click-through rate.
It’s also worth mentioning that the ad was relevant to my audience. That’s why they actively responded to it.
It’s also worth noting that beehiiv regularly sends ad opportunities if you have over 1,000 subscribers and you keep your account active.
On average, I get 3-5 requests monthly.
Occasionally, you’ll receive irrelevant ad offers or multiple sponsorship inquiries from the same company. It happened to me many times.
From my experience, I can say that irrelevant ads have obviously the worst performance since users aren’t interested in clicking on the ad.
Besides, if you run the same ad several times, you might get different results! For instance, Hubspot sent me a sponsorship request twice. The second time, I got almost twice as many clicks.
So, ensure to experiment with the copy and tone of voice to find what resonates with your audience.
4. Selling paid subscriptions
As an email newsletter platform, beehiiv offers content creators an opportunity to build a recurring revenue stream through paid subscriptions.
Beehiiv doesn’t charge any fees for paid newsletters, and they only take a 2.9% + $0.30 processing fee from Stripe, their payment processor.
With their platform, you can:
- Set up a paywall to protect your premium content
- Offer different pricing plans
- Offer monthly and yearly plans
- Create custom offers and free trials directly on the platform
- Track your subscription revenue
- Promote your paid newsletter
I’ve made $392 from beehiiv subscriptions in 2025.
Here is how much you can earn from beehiiv paid subscriptions over a year if you have 100 paid subscribers paying $7/m.
The path toward monetizing an email list is not easy, even for established content creators. Therefore, I encourage you to try different monetization options to determine what works for you.
Can beehiiv drive organic traffic?
Most people think of beehiiv as a newsletter growth platform. But in 2026, I started treating it like a content asset, too.
In early 2026, I opened my newsletter, Behind the Rankings, for indexing. I write detailed posts about SEO tools and content monetization every week anyway, so why not let Google find them?
The results surprised me. Within the first three months, just 20 indexed newsletter pages generated over 9,000 impressions, 82 clicks, and a 0.9% average CTR in search results — all from content I was already sending to my subscribers.
When you publish on beehiiv, you don’t just send newsletters. You can create a searchable web archive that Google, other search engines, and LLMs can index and rank.
If you’re already putting effort into your newsletter content, beehiiv gives you a real shot at capturing search traffic too.
beehiiv MCP
In late March 2026, beehiiv launched a native MCP integration. MCP (Model Context Protocol) is an open standard that lets AI tools like Claude, ChatGPT, and Gemini connect directly to your beehiiv account.
Luckily, I was among the first creators to test it!
Once you connect beehiiv to your preferred LLM (it’s Claude for me), your AI can pull your real subscriber data, post performance, earnings, and acquisition sources, and analyze all of it through a simple conversation.
In my own tests with Claude, I asked it to analyze my newsletter performance for 2026 and break down my email list growth by source.
Within seconds, I had a full dashboard showing my average open rate (59.6% — 40% above industry average), click rate (4.3%), delivery rate (97%), and a breakdown of exactly where my new subscribers came from: my website, LinkedIn, Boosts, embedded forms, and even one from Google organic.
The current version is read-only, meaning you can analyze and research, but can’t make changes yet.
The beehiiv team has also said that Phase 2 is coming soon, which will let you create segments, draft posts, and set up automations directly through your AI.
beehiiv pricing
I hope you’ve found this honest overview helpful so far!
In this section, I’ll dive into the beehiiv pricing details.
While many features are available for free, the key functionalities, including monetization options, are available to users on the Launch, Scale, Max, and Enterprise plans.
To make it easier for you, I’ve put together a table outlining what each beehiiv pricing plan includes and which one might be the best fit for you.
Beehiiv also offers a customized plan for content creators and companies with over 100,000 subscribers.
If that applies to you and you’d like to learn more about what beehiiv can provide, you can inquire about the enterprise plan here.
Standout features you should know
Even though I’ve already covered a lot on how beehiiv works and how you can benefit from using it as a content creator, I’ve handpicked a few more features worth knowing.
These are unique features that make beehiiv stand out from other creator tools.
Audio newsletter
I think the sky is the limit for the beehiiv team since they continue to impress their users with new features while competitors can’t keep up.
With an audio newsletter, you can let your subscribers listen to your newsletters instead of reading them.
This feature is available by default, which means you don’t have to do anything to turn it on.
I’ll soon test it on my audience and share their feedback. Overall, this seems to be a helpful feature for busy people.
Mobile app builder
With beehiiv, your readers can install your custom app, add it to their home screen, and never miss another piece of content from you.
This is a new level of engagement with your target audience I haven’t seen other platforms offering.
To launch your app, simply toggle it on in your account here: Design → Website Builder → Settings → Mobile App.
"Pay what you want" subscription
- Monthly subscription
- Annual subscription
- One-time payment
- Name Your Price
beehiiv AI
Last year, beehiiv introduced its own suite of AI tools to help you streamline your content creation.
Here’s what you’ll find inside your beehiiv dashboard:
- AI Writing Assistant to create newsletters faster
- AI Text Tool to fix all possible grammar and spelling mistakes and autocomplete your sentences
- AI Image Tool to create unique images for your newsletters
- AI Translator to translate your content into Spanish, French, German, Italian, and Portuguese
It’s worth mentioning that beehiiv AI is only available for users on a Scale and Enterprise plan.
If you are interested in giving it a try, I recommend signing up for a 30-day free trial first.
beehiiv FAQ: quick answers
Have you already tried beehiiv? Feel free to share your experience and opinion about beehiiv in the comments below.
I’ve also collected frequently asked questions that people actively search for.
What is the difference between beehiiv and Substack?
beehiiv and Substack are two of the leading platforms for creating and sharing newsletters. They both come packed with features like email marketing, landing pages, and ways to monetize your content.
Exec Sum put together a handy table that compares the costs and benefits of beehiiv and Substack as your revenue grows.
It turns out that paying a flat fee might be more advantageous for you, especially as your earnings start to increase.
beehiiv vs. Kit
I’ve been using Kit (Convertkit) for three years, and I’ve really loved the platform.
Unlike beehiiv, Kit has a bunch of pre-built landing pages for different purposes that you can set up in just a few minutes.
For instance, they have templates for promoting freebies, ebooks, events, podcasts, and more.
On the flip side, beehiiv doesn’t have any templates available yet, so you’ll need to spend some time figuring out how to create your own landing pages for promoting your products.
That said, beehiiv does offer more customization options to make your newsletters and website look stunning. Plus, when it comes to monetization features, beehiiv definitely stands out.
With options like boosts, sponsored ads, and subscriptions, I was able to make $858 in 2025.
While the beehiiv partner program made me over $10,000 without active promotion (mostly thanks to the posts on this website).
Does beehiiv have newsletter templates?
Beehiiv has pre-built newsletter templates.
Additionally, you can customize the newsletter background, fonts, and colors. They have a powerful newsletter embed feature, which lets you embed various elements and make your newsletters look nicer.
How to integrate beehiiv and WordPress?
It’s super easy to embed custom subscribe forms into WordPress and start collecting email addresses.
On most pages of my site (including this one), you’ll find a subscribe form right below the content.
Setting it up was simple: I grabbed a snippet of code from beehiiv and dropped it into my blog post using Elementor, the site builder I use with WordPress.
Plus, beehiiv has a handy feature to automatically publish your content on your website through RSS, using a free plugin.
You can learn more about WordPress and beehiiv integration here.
Join the newsletter for actionable SEO tips, case studies, and a behind-the-scenes look at my affiliate marketing journey.
No spam. Unsubscribe anytime.
6 Responses
I see many positives for Beehiiv. Which makes me very interested.
I have only one question.
Who owns my subscriber list? Beehiiv or me? If it belongs to Bwehiiv that’s a big negative for me.
I own my list on Substack. And on Medium I think.
Thank you for this helpful article!
We have a large wordpress site and currently use ConvertKit. We are in the process of starting a paid newsletter. This is going to sound crazy.. could you use convert kit and Beehive at the same time? Could you use convertkit with it’s wordpress integration and beehive for it’s monetization and paid subscription service.
Hi Victoria. One question, does Beehiiv has the option to unsubscribe from different target audiences separately, as well of a bulk unsubscribe option?
Thank you for this article, very helpful! One question I have on the Launch plan that I can’t seem to find info on anywhere is whether it includes simple automations? Specifically, just thinking a Welcome Email that’s triggered when the user subscribes.
Great article!
Love how clearly you’ve broken down the ‘small list, real money’ path here… the Partner Program boosts ad network numbers are a super useful benchmark for creators who assume they need 10k subs before monetizing. One pattern I’m seeing is that once Beehiiv is dialed in as the email monetization layer, the next bottleneck is distribution… which is where tools like Blogsitefy come in, turning those same newsletters into an SEO-rich blog on your own domain so Google, not just Boosts or cross-recs, can keep sending you readers for years.
Would you ever consider piping your best Beehiiv issues into a structured content hub like that, so this review, the case studies, and your Medium work all compound as one search ‘surface’ instead of living on separate islands?