So, the other week, I got a lovely little email from my newsletter service, ConvertKit, informing me that my subscription plan is being discontinued soon, as the finances weren’t working out for the company. Oh well, times are tough, and money’s tight for everyone on this hellscape of a planet.

Unfortunately, the next lowest subscription is $400 a year. Well, $390 — I suppose someone made the calculation that $400 is just way too much, but 390? Yeah, I guess that’s fine. Except, it isn’t for me. Better yet, ConvertKit was prepared to automatically charge me in April, and the notice went to my junk folder, with me only finding it by accident. I was nearly in for a nasty shock in about six months.

I previously described ConvertKit as the best mailing service because of its flexibility, but the more I used it, the less impressed I was. For one, images didn’t seem to want to load properly, but more significantly, I recently tried to set up a mailing list for my band, and adding ConvertKit’s DNS records broke the site’s security certificate. If you visit rivermann.com, you might see a warning from your browser that it’s a fraudulent website. It is not, and I am fixing it. 

So, two things: First, ConvertKit can fuck right off. While I’m at it, I might as well tell anyone reading this to steer clear of BlueHost. I tried it out for the band, and aside from being slow, its security certificates might be jive anyway, which isn’t helping. 

Second, and this is the important part, I spent the last week setting up a new mailing list with MailPoet. As such, this is more or less a PSA that a different company now has your email. Once I can feel confident that everything is working, I will delete my CovertKit account. 

I’m not that blown away by MailPoet; I can use a free plan, and it integrates with WordPress nicely, but the email WYSIWYG editor is not very capable (especially when compared to the editor that’s used everywhere else on WordPress), and I cannot use CSS in any way to style the emails.

They mostly look fine, but I would really like a border around my article’s featured images, as otherwise, some of them look a little funny. I could remove the border from the site, manually add a border to all ~200 articles, and reupload them… but that’s a lot of work for an email that most people will look at for a couple of seconds before they either visit the article or just ignore it. 

Also, after activating the mailing list, it seems that MailPoet took it upon itself to send out an email for the article I shared back at the start of the month. So if you’re wondering why you got two notices about the Rusty Bryant transcription, that’s why. You were a little late to the party, MailPoet!

Alright then, hopefully this is all squared away. I’ll be back… sometime. I just have to redo this for my band, too, after I move the hosting over to SiteGround. One last thing: ConvertKit, fuck off. Thanks for nothing. (I know ConvertKit rebranded as Kit, but I’m not calling it that because it’s fucking stupid.) MailPoet, please don’t make me regret this…