Beehiiv Is 4 Years Old and Wants to Replace Mailchimp. Can It?
$0 to $30 million in revenue. Four years. 90,000 customers. $50 million raised. Built by the team behind Morning Brew. Beehiiv is the fastest-growing newsletter platform on earth and it’s not even close.
But can it actually replace Mailchimp? Depends what you’re building.
The founding team grew Morning Brew to 1.5 million subscribers before it sold for $75M. They didn’t build Beehiiv from market research — they built it from experience. Every feature maps to a real problem: recommendation network (they grew through cross-promotion), ad network (they monetised through sponsorships), web publication (they needed a reader-facing site, not just an inbox).
Deliverability complaints
Multiple users report emails in spam or not arriving. For a newsletter platform, that’s like a restaurant with food safety issues.
$0 to $49/mo jump
No middle ground. Every monetisation feature is locked behind the Scale plan. Free plan is a demo, not a product.
VC-funded
$50M in venture capital means investors expect exponential returns. That creates pressure on pricing and decisions. Kit is bootstrapped — it answers to users, not investors.