What is beehiiv?

What is beehiiv?

beehiiv was launched in 2021 by Tyler Denk, the first employee at Morning Brew, along with Benjamin Hargett and Jake Hurd. The premise came straight from that job: the team had grown a newsletter to millions of readers on tooling that was never built for publishers, and beehiiv is the tool they wished had existed.

It is not an email tool with a website bolted on. A beehiiv publication is a newsletter, a website and a podcast feed built from one editor, with a custom domain, SEO settings and a page builder included on the free Launch plan. That plan carries up to 2,500 subscribers with unlimited sends, which is why so many newsletters start here and only pay once monetisation begins.

Monetisation is the part that sets it apart commercially. beehiiv takes no platform cut of paid subscriptions, against the 10 percent Substack charges, and it runs its own Ad Network that places advertisers into newsletters on any paid plan, with payouts on the 20th of each month. Paid recommendations, the feature most people still call Boosts, was renamed in July 2026. The referral program, the tool beehiiv is best known for, starts on the Scale plan rather than the free one.

One structural fact matters more than any feature: on beehiiv a custom domain can also be the email sending domain, and DMARC authentication is required on it. Your mail leaves under your own authenticated domain, on the free plan. There is no SMTP relay. The API manages subscribers, segments and posts on every plan, but programmatic sending through the Send API waits for the Max tier.