beehiiv features: what you get on each plan

This page answers one question per row: does the feature exist, and which plan turns it on. Plan gating was read from beehiiv’s own plan comparison table and help centre on 14 September 2026. Where the help centre states a threshold the comparison table omits, we quote the help centre and say so in the section.

Feature matrix

Feature by feature

beehiiv landing pages

Start here, because the honest answer is that beehiiv has no product called a landing page. Searches for the phrase have risen sharply over the past year, and anyone arriving with that vocabulary will not find a matching menu item. What beehiiv has instead is a Subscribe page, ordinary website pages built in the same editor, and a link in bio page. Those three things together do the job most people mean.

All three are on the free Launch plan, which is the part competitors do not match. The help centre documents subscribe forms placed anywhere on the site, signup flows attached to those forms, custom fields on the subscribe form, and a content gate that captures an email before revealing a post. None of it carries a plan badge. On Mailchimp the equivalent set is also free; on Substack there is no page editor at all.

The limit is that these are pages on your publication site, not standalone campaign landing pages with their own analytics and split tests. There is no per-page conversion report of the kind Unbounce or Instapage exist to sell, and A/B testing sits on Scale and applies to email rather than pages. If you run paid acquisition and need to compare five page variants against one offer, beehiiv is not the tool for that half of the job.

beehiiv templates

Two different things share the word, and the plan answer differs for each. Email templates are listed on the free Launch plan in beehiiv’s comparison table, with no tier restriction noted above it. Website templates and themes are a separate library inside the Website Builder, also available from launch, and the help centre documents both selecting one at setup and switching template or theme afterwards, the second being the one that usually costs money elsewhere.

Where beehiiv is weaker than a design-led tool is the ceiling rather than the floor. The editor is block-based and clean, and the output looks modern without work, but there is no equivalent of Flodesk’s art-directed layouts or custom font shapes. For most newsletters that is the right trade. For a brand whose mail is the brand, it is a real gap.

One practical trap worth knowing before you commit: beehiiv runs two website builders side by side. The current builder has around forty-five help articles, and a legacy builder retains nineteen of its own, plus a one-click migration tool and two manual migration guides. A template or theme instruction found through a search engine may describe the builder you are not using, and the help centre publishes a dedicated article on telling the two apart.

beehiiv boosts

The name is out of date, and that matters if you are shopping on it. beehiiv’s help centre states plainly that Boosts are now called paid recommendations, in an article last updated on 9 July 2026. Free and paid recommendations now sit together in one Recommendations section rather than in two separate products.

Two pieces were retired outright in the same change: Email Boosts and Direct Links no longer exist. If a guide published before mid-2026 tells you to run a Boost inside an email or hand out a direct boost link, that route is closed. The other change has a quieter cost: automatic cleaning is gone, so subscribers who fail verification now stay on your list carrying a tag instead of being removed for you. That is more control and more housekeeping.

On gating the help centre is unambiguous and goes further than the comparison table: paid recommendations are available on paid beehiiv plans, while free recommendations are available on all plans. So the swap-audiences mechanic costs nothing on Launch, and only the paid acquisition side needs Scale. No minimum subscriber count is published for either.

beehiiv ads

The Ad Network is beehiiv’s clearest reason to exist for a publisher, and its own help article, updated 12 August 2026, states it is available on paid beehiiv plans. No minimum subscriber count is published, which is worth saying because comparison articles frequently assert one. We looked and beehiiv does not state it.

The mechanics are documented in a way most ad marketplaces avoid. Deals run on CPM, counted on opens, or on CPC. Earnings are tracked for seventy-two hours after a send, reports are generated within twenty-four hours, and payouts are processed on the 20th of each month for the previous month’s ads. That is a real cash-flow fact for anyone budgeting on this income rather than treating it as a bonus.

The split people miss is between marketplace ads and direct deals. The Ad Network places advertisers with you; the Sponsorship Storefront, where advertisers approach you and buy from your own shop front, is listed on Max and Enterprise plans only. A publisher whose plan is selling sponsorships directly is therefore looking at the top tier, not the middle one.

beehiiv referral program

The referral program is the feature beehiiv is best known for, it is genuinely built in rather than bolted on, and it is not on the free plan. beehiiv’s comparison table places it on Scale, alongside the Ad Network and automations. Anyone choosing beehiiv specifically because of its referral reputation should price Scale at $43/mo from the start rather than plan to grow into it.

What you get is a milestone system where subscribers earn rewards for verified referrals, tracked against each subscriber rather than against a campaign. The verification tie-in is the part worth understanding: the same verification machinery that cleans referred subscribers now tags failures instead of removing them, so referral counts and list hygiene are two jobs rather than one.

It also reaches into automations. The help centre documents a Referral Action trigger usable inside an automation workflow, which means a referral milestone can start a sequence rather than just grant a reward. That combination sits on Scale as well, since automations arrive on the same tier, and the two features were clearly designed to be bought together.

beehiiv website

The website builder is the strongest part of the free plan and the thing that makes beehiiv a publishing platform rather than an email tool. Launch includes the site, a custom domain, SEO settings, custom pages, a navbar you control, version history, custom fonts, an HTML block, a contact form, tracking pixels and an AI chat that assembles pages for you. Counting the help centre, the current builder alone carries roughly forty-five documented features.

The fact that deserves the most attention is the one buried in the custom domain article, updated 1 July 2026: the domain can be set as your web domain and as your email sending domain and branded link, and every beehiiv publication on a custom domain is required to set up DMARC authentication. That is domain-level authentication on a plan that costs $0. Substack charges $50 for a custom domain and still sends every newsletter from its own address, with no SPF, DKIM or DMARC on yours.

Against a real site builder the gaps are predictable and narrow. There is no arbitrary code deployment, no database, no store beyond beehiiv’s own digital products, and a Webflow or WordPress build will beat it on structural control. For a publication whose site exists to convert readers into subscribers and hold an archive, that ceiling is high enough, and the price is right.

Continue reading

• beehiiv pricing: what each plan actually costs as your list grows
• beehiiv review: our full verdict after hands-on testing
• beehiiv alternatives: who to look at if the plan gates above are dealbreakers