beehiiv vs Resend
Both are marketing tools. Here is what separates them.
What beehiiv is
beehiiv is a newsletter platform that keeps the publishing tools and the earning tools in one account. Alongside the email editor sit a no-code website builder and podcast hosting, and the platform names four routes to revenue: paid subscriptions, its advertising network, paid recommendations and digital products. Paid subscriptions carry a 0 percent take rate, so reader payments arrive whole. The advertising network is the part with the most moving pieces. It requires the Scale plan or higher, and a publisher has to be actively sending to receive offers at all. Up to five ad offers can be reserved at a time. The advertiser, not the publisher, decides whether a placement is priced per thousand or per click: CPM deals pay a fixed amount per 1,000 unique opens, CPC deals pay per verified unique click, and placements are measured on impressions, unique opens and verified clicks. Earnings move through Stripe Express into a beehiiv wallet with no withdrawal fee, and payouts are processed on the 20th of each month for the previous month's earnings, which is worth knowing if you are planning cash flow around ad income. Launch is the free tier at $0 a month, capped at 2,500 subscribers with three publications and one team seat. It still includes the newsletter, a website, a podcast, custom domains, a link-in-bio page and the recommendation network, plus API access, though not the Send API. What it leaves out is the money: no ad network, no paid subscriptions, no digital products. Scale, listed at $517 billed annually and shown as $43 a month, is where those unlock, together with email automations, surveys and polls, A/B testing and the referral programme. It allows up to 100,000 subscribers and three team seats. Max, listed at $1,151 billed annually and shown as $96 a month, is aimed at operations running several titles: up to ten publications and unlimited team seats. It adds removal of beehiiv branding, audio newsletters, RSS to send, dynamic content, group subscriptions and the Send API. Enterprise covers audiences above 100,000 subscribers and adds dedicated IP addresses and SSO. The plan ladder tracks a publication's stage fairly closely. The free tier gives a writer everything needed to publish and grow an audience, and the paid tiers are largely about being allowed to charge for it, sell against it or run more than one title at a time.
What Resend is
Resend is a service for building, testing and sending email from an application. It covers transactional messages, the ones triggered by something a user does, and marketing campaigns, which it calls Broadcasts. It is built for developers: sending anything at all requires a Resend API key and a domain you have verified yourself. The free plan covers 3,000 emails a month across three verified domains, along with 10,000 automation runs. Pro is $20 a month for 50,000 emails and ten domains. Scale is $90 a month for 100,000 emails and up to a thousand domains. Emails past the allowance cost $0.90 per thousand on Pro and Scale, and automation runs past the free allowance cost $0.0015 each. Scale customers sending more than 3,000 emails a day can add a dedicated IP for $30 a month. Enterprise terms are set to fit. Most of what the dashboard does is also reachable through the API. Broadcasts can be created and sent in one request, and cancelled again while scheduled or queued. Webhooks can be created, retrieved, listed and deleted programmatically, and every email webhook and GET email endpoint returns the Message-ID. Contacts import from a single CSV upload running to millions of rows. Suppressed addresses are managed from the dashboard or the API, request logs are available from anywhere, and sending statistics break down in more detail. API keys carry separate permissions, and a key exposed in public code is detected, revoked and reported to the team automatically. There is a CLI for the terminal, SDKs for several languages including an official PHP one, and support for custom headers. The template side deals with the awkward parts of email HTML. The code editor flags pasted markup that email clients will not render correctly. Templates can be organised into folders, charts can be embedded in a message, links can be turned into rich Open Graph previews, and AI prompts can reference existing content across broadcasts, templates and automations. Resend runs a hosted MCP server with OAuth built in, supporting OAuth 2.1 with PKCE, Client ID Metadata documents, an official HTTP transport and the Agent Plugins Standard. It connects to Claude in one click from the connector directory, and the MCP server and Resend skills install from the Codex plugin marketplace. Auth0 transactional email can be routed through it with an official integration, and sign-up works from inside Vercel or the Vercel CLI. A domain in use by another Resend team can be verified and transferred. The project began as open source in 2022, joined Y Combinator's winter 2023 batch and launched the sending platform that year.
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