Your newsletter deserves a home you feel good about. Substack import is live — bring your posts, bring your subscribers, leave the baggage behind. joyful.to

Looking forward to a Joyful year! There has been a flurry of updates as I detail in the 2025 recap: blog.joyful.to/joyful-newsl... If you're looking for a new newsletter platform that gets out of your way and makes it joyful to write again, give joyful.to a shot! #newsletters #writersky

Subscriber-based billing is kind of nuts from a buyer's perspective unless you're doing huge volumes of emails. If you're sending out a weekly email to 50,000 people --> that's 200,000 emails per month. That costs $20 to send. But platforms will charge HUNDREDS of dollars per month. #newsletters

Do you run a small community or meetup and need to send newsletters regularly? I'd love to chat with you and hear about how you go about doing it and what it costs you. Feel free to DM or reply! #newsletters #meetup #community

Been busy a bit lately for updates, but both joyful.to and @dailytokki.com are chugging! Joyful has been getting more and more signups and getting good feedback. #buildinpublic #writingsky #booksky #langsky

✅ Offline editing With Joyful (joyful.to), if you lose internet connection, don't worry! Everything will be saved locally and when you reconnect it will sync up! Works for teams as well! #buildinpublic #writersky

✅ You can now add tags to your subscribers! Suppose only some subscribers should get your weekly newsletter and others your book updates. This let's you make sure everyone gets the right newsletters. How do you currently segment your subscribers? #buildinpublic #writersky #booksky

Took a few days from working on Joyful and Daily Tokki to enjoy walking around in nature. Back at it now and coming with some updates on what's next! ➡️ Web-only blocks ➡️ Custom CSS ➡️ Importing from other platforms What do you look for in a newsletter platform? #buildinpublic #booksky #writersky

Want to leave a comment to your teammate when writing a newsletter, now you can on Joyful! Works in real-time collaborate with reactions and replies. Create, resolve, and delete comments on your newsletter before sending. joyful.to #writersky #booksky #buildinpublic

Sometimes you need to revert to a previous version when writing a newsletter -- that's where versioning comes in! Versioning update coming soon and yes it works in collaborative mode! 10 autosaves & it'll make a checkpoint or you can manually save it. joyful.to #buildinpublic #writersky

How much does an email cost? If we use Amazon’s Simple Email Service (SES), 1000 emails cost $0.10. Assume you have 10,000 subscribers and publish a weekly newsletter, that’s 40,000 emails a month, or about $4.00. Just $4!

Prototyping a new homepage for users on Joyful. Colors and fonts will be fully adjustable to match your preferences. Thinking of different layouts as well. How do you like your newsletters presented? #buildinpublic #writersky

A place that beautifully shows your newsletters is incredibly important. For Joyful, your personal page will be: ✅ Easy to make ✅ Easy to customize ✅ SEO optimized ✅ Extensible for your uses ✅ Looks good on any device All with the block-based editor. How did you design your newsletter home page?

Email automations are the next major thing I'll be placing in for joyful.to. After talking with some folks, timing different emails for their subscribers lets them better engage with them. But at the bare minimum, having a timely welcome email series is great to have! #buildinpublic #marketing

Adding in double opt-in sign-ups to reduce bots and spam signups! You'll be able to turn it on or off for each of your publications as you wish. Any other critical features you need for your newsletter platform? joyful.to #buildinpublic #emailmarketing

Almost done w/ collaborative editing! 🤝 When writing @dailytokki.com's newsletter we often want to work on the draft at the same time. Just some final tests and it's live! What do you want from a newsletter platform? joyful.to P.S. Substack migration almost in too! #buildinpublic #writersky

Switching away from Substack? Currently making it easier for those who want a new platform to switch and keep rolling. Starting with Substack, you'll be able to migrate newsletters, posts, subscribers, and payments. Will be live soon! joyful.to #newsletters #buildinpublic #writersky

What's the most frustrating part of writing a newsletter for you? Managing subscribers, payments, analytics, formatting, something else? #selfpublish #newsletters #buildinpublic

When making Joyful I wanted you to be able to have full access to the editor without even signing in. It's a familiar block-based editor, but makes sure to compile it to email-compatible HTML that looks good on any device. Give it a spin and let me know! joyful.to #writersky #buildinpublic

✅ Context manager ✅ Domains for teams If you have a team, newsletters, publications, and domains should be separate from your personal account. Now you can switch between your accounts and your stats, publications, and subscribers all update accordingly! joyful.to #buildinpublic

The solution for hosting was to use @caddy.bsky.social with a dynamic reverse proxy. Calling its API allowed me to store references from custom domains to their respective subdomains. But it requires a refresh to actually get the right content; something with @svelte.dev hooks? tbd #buildinpublic

Working on custom domain hosting today; needed to rework the organization of the app a bit to allow for subdomains so that adding DNS records resolves better. Should be resolved today, but everything is in great working order! #buildinpublic

Just pushed the latest version! So far what has been done: ✅ Editor swap for more natural writing experience ✅ Better image handling and editing ✅ Improved subscriber management Looking for a new newsletter platform? Switching away from Substack? Check out ➡️ joyful.to

✅ Added date mark This lets you have dates automatically entered into your newsletters (especially useful if you schedule send!) Can be completely formatted just like any ol' text node. #buildinpublic

✅ Customizable buttons are in Makes it easy to make it your own and link to anything you want. Click statistics are baked-in. #buildinpublic

✅ Templates and placeholders Really fun feature to make work. You can have a template with a Placeholder element. Then when you make a newsletter with that template, it'll compile just right. Great for reusing templates over and over! #buildinpublic

✅ Custom tiptap image node in! Needs some styling, but functionally works great! #buildinpublic

It's been bug whack-a-mole. Honestly, images have been the hardest to deal with for some reason. Resizing them and adding a caption, then having that all save without rerendering has been a pain. Not sure if there is an easier way to work with them in tiptap or anything. #buildinpublic

So far, with the tiptap editor, I'm 80% back to where I was. But I've used tiptap in the past and it's got this bad code vibe to it. It's just abstract enough that things can just get so wirey and all over the place.

Almost done replacing the entire editor for joyful.to with an extended @tiptap.dev editor. Dealing with contenteditable was just a total headache. Needed to extend functionality for drag to reorder and whatnot, but it's almost back to full working! Should be ready 1-2 days! #buildinpublic

A sneakily complex feature to implement on joyful.to is multiline selection! Normally, you should able to select text across lines. But if the blocks are all contenteditable without the top being contenteditable, it's rather tricky. It's been a surprisingly difficult task to implement, but fun!

Migrated away from neon and over to supabase just because the compute for the DB was too much. I just need transactional stateless. Maybe it had it, but I couldn't find it easily. Using drizzle was a total game changer, though: just swapped the postgres string and it just worked.

✅ Drop-in snippets for signups on your other sites You can now customize the title, description, button color, and text to match your brand and newsletter! Looking for a new newsletter platform? Check out Joyful --> joyful.to #buildinpublic

So, it turns out that the cron job I am running for joyful.to actually keeps the neon database running continuously. I suppose this was expected. I basically ran out the 50 CU hours in 2 days. Maybe it is worth it to put the db on one of my others servers, since I'm already paying.

✅ Scheduled newsletters are in! On Joyful, you can now schedule newsletters to go out right on time without worrying about it. If you want to check it out go to --> joyful.to #buildinpublic #newsletters

Continuing to work on the scheduled newsletter functionality for joyful.to! About a day away. Right now I just have a cronjob ping an endpoint that checks for newsletters that need to be sent out. If it becomes too much, I suppose I can spin something up like Redis. #buildinpublic

Decided on a name: Joyful. Newsletters should be joyful to write, joyful to send, and joyful to read. It's live over at joyful.to! Will keep reaching out to those who've been interested in trying it out. I'll be sure to use it for @dailytokki.com this upcoming week! #buildinginpublic

Currently working on DNS domain resolution with @svelte.dev's hooks and it's been really nice and straight-forward to develop. It lets you point your domain (e.g., blog.domain.com) to the site and have all your posts there in addition to being able to send from your domain. #buildinpublic

✅ Spell-checking and word count in! Fun fact I just learned: if you turn any element into a contenteditable element, you can then place in spellcheck=true to enable the browser's spellcheck. Also added quality-of-life features: reading time and last saved #buildinpublic

✅ Shipped personal sites: publish & email in one. Posts get SEO discovery + build email lists. Added multi-publication support (like Daily Tokki: English/Korean versions). Built with @svelte.dev + neon.tech + @drizzle.team ⏭️ Next up: drop-in signup forms

✅ User profile in where you can set picture, description, and see previous newsletters. ✅ Users can subscribe to your newsletters (however many you have) #buildinginpublic #newsletters

Oh and actually forgot while taking screenshots of the other features, but it was in dark mode! So, light / dark mode are also part of it. Nearly there for all the things I would want for the @dailytokki.com newsletter. Hopefully others will want it too! #buildinpublic

For those who are migrating away from Substack and don't have a good alternative, let me know what features you're looking for! Actively building the easiest way to create and send newsletters with back to basics simple pricing. I plan to have it live within the week for initial users to test!

The goal is to make it the easiest way to start, write, and send a newsletter to people who want to read your words. Flash will come can be added, but it must look beautiful and well-designed with the barebones. Stats about what your audience likes should be a given, not locked behind paywalls.

After a first pass, I've gotten it to a good point that it's pleasurable to use. There are still some rough edges here and there, but it can actually send, save, etc. #buildinpublic

We send out a newsletter each week for @dailytokki.com and for some reason it was just so hard to find a platform that just lets me write, design a little, and it just works. No limits, no extra futzing, and no drag-and-drop hell. Let me know if you're in a similar boat.