On Thursday, newsletter platform beehiiv unveiled a significant upgrade to its services, introducing features like instant analytics and AI-powered website building, among other enhancements.
In a launch video, beehiiv’s co-founder and CEO Tyler Denk emphasized that the true strength of newsletter platforms lies in user ownership.
“Having control over your audience, distribution, brand, and even your earning potential,” he explained. “In today’s world of AI and algorithms, ownership isn’t just beneficial—it’s crucial.”
The goal is to empower creators and journalists with greater autonomy and more avenues to develop and scale their businesses on beehiiv.
The comprehensive update brings the following features:
- Enabling creators to sell digital goods like e-books without beehiiv taking a commission. Next year, options for selling courses and merchandise will also be available.
- A tool that allows users to create websites with AI, eliminating the need for advanced coding skills or developers. An initial version launched a few months ago, following beehiiv’s acquisition of AI website builder Typedream last year.
With this update, users can now generate complete websites simply by interacting with AI—what beehiiv calls “vibe coding.” Beyond text prompts, users can also upload or drag and drop images, including screenshots of other sites, for the AI to replicate.
- Support for hosting and distributing podcasts directly on a creator’s beehiiv site, allowing newsletters, podcasts, and websites to be managed from a single platform instead of multiple ones.
- Live analytics to monitor audience engagement and site traffic, along with detailed insights into which channels are most effective at driving users.
- A “link in bio” feature, enabling creators to connect to other digital platforms and their beehiiv content without relying on third-party services.
- Access to professionally crafted website templates, elevating the appearance of both websites and newsletters. Newsletter templates are also available to ensure a unified brand style across all content.
- Audience segmentation tools, allowing creators to tailor content for specific groups within their audience, such as by location, age, or gender.
- Automated workflow capabilities—for instance, automatically sending a welcome email when someone subscribes. beehiiv began rolling out these automation features several weeks ago.
- Improved advertising tools, making it easier to discover ad opportunities and view estimated earnings. Denk noted that creators can upload their assets, set budgets, and launch campaigns directly on beehiiv. The new ad dashboard also allows users to monitor campaign results and generate custom reports.
- Paid subscription options, with beehiiv taking no share of the revenue (the company claims to be the only platform that doesn’t deduct fees from paid subscriptions). This feature includes multiple subscription levels and analytics.
Beehiiv now positions itself as the first platform to offer a complete content creation workflow, enabling users to “create, publish, grow, analyze, and monetize” without fees, plugins, coding, or giving up ownership.
Denk stated in the video that beehiiv has evolved beyond a newsletter service and now serves as the operating system for the creator economy. With these new features, beehiiv aims to rival platforms like Lovable, WordPress, and Patreon.
Founded in 2021, beehiiv reports having sent over 35 billion emails and supporting more than 55,000 creators, including Oliver Darcy with Status. The company most recently secured $33 million in Series B funding in April 2024, with Lightspeed Venture Partners and NEA participating as investors.
