Stack

Buttondown is powered by a variety of tools and services. This page is a list of the tools we use and why we use them.

(Interested in the open source software we use and maintain? Check out  the open-source software page.)

FAQs

Why do you use so many services?

The most important resource I have is my energy, and being able to trade X dollars (where X is any number less than a hundred) for even trivial amounts of energy is an absolute no-brainer.

Why so many ESPs?

When I launched Buttondown, AWS Simple Email Service was notoriously low-quality and Postmark did not support broadcast emails. Mailgun was the choice I went with, and there are still many customers using Mailgun's rails who have custom domain records set up that I don't have the heart (or incentive) to migrate.

I like having redundancy — if one provider were to go down or drastically change rates it would be trivial for me to migrate — but if I were starting Buttondown from scratch I would likely just have everything run through Postmark.

Why don't you use something for X?

Some specific choices I made to roll my own:

• Auth: I know it's increasingly trendy to outsource auth to a paid vendor but I'm not a fan of the lock-in and I like having full control over the experience.
• Feature flags: rolled my own for performance reasons. Plan on open sourcing it at some point.

Changelog