Beehiiv adds even more features to go up against competitors and win over creators

“That’s the transition we’ve been making for the past six to 12 months,” Tyler Denk, CEO and co-founder of Beehiiv, told Digiday. “Newsletters are our bread and butter… we do it very well, but we think we can be the place where any content creator or business can engage with, grow and monetize their audience.”

Q1 2026 was the best quarter in Beehiiv’s history, with the platform adding $4.5M ARR and crossing 50,000 active users, according to data shared by the company with Digiday. 

And Denk says Beehiiv hit their quarterly goal for podcasts within 24 hours of launching the feature (though he declined to give details) and exceeded its Q2 goal by more than 10x. Half of the platform’s podcast hosts migrated their existing podcasts from other platforms.

That migration is one of several waves that have taken place over the last year or so as Beehiiv courts more creators with additional features and those creators reckon with some platform-specific issues, be they political or otherwise. 

Frankie de la Cretaz, journalist and creator of the Out of Your League newsletter, moved from Substack to Beehiiv seven months ago. 

“I wish I had done it sooner, for both ethical and financial reasons,” they told Digiday, citing Substack’s reported content moderation issues. 

Since the migration, De la Cretaz has seen a 78.4% increase in net income that’s worth $21,325 annually, though they say their Beehiiv platform fee will be higher next year as they took advantage of a discounted rate. 

They also say the move wasn’t seamless, but that they had support from the platform’s team as well as a friend who could do some backend logistics for them. 

“Substack was user-friendly but I didn’t realize how much backend control I was giving up by being there,” they said. “Beehiiv is fairly intuitive…I also have a lot more granular control on the backend of the platform. There are a lot of tools I don’t utilize but it’s nice to know they exist.”

More features, more ownership, more creators

And more tools are coming.

Just a few weeks after launching podcasts, Beehiiv added MCP-powered AI analytics, the first ever for a hosting platform. With this tool, creators can “talk” to their data through LLMs that access Beehiiv’s open source analytics to better understand data points like how their podcasts are performing and where they’re most popular in the world.  

The platform is also adding webinars to its digital product suite (live events hosted on-platform) and adjusting its paid subscriptions to allow for metered paywalls and paid trials to help creators convert more free readers. 

Denk says these new features are a direct result of user feedback and that the company’s roadmap is often accelerated by creator demands.

“Somewhere after launching digital products, we tried to take our victory lap, but we got dozens of requests for the next thing users want,” Denk said. “They’re like ‘hey I want to host webinars.’”

Denk says humility and an open mind to feedback is what keeps their roadmap so fast and fluid. “Some companies are very rigid,” he said. 

But it’s not just a willingness to adjust its platform based on user feedback that Denk believes makes it a better option for creators. It’s a question of ownership, and what Beehiiv allows its creators to have full control over – that includes revenue and audience. Denk says Beehiiv is “unopinionated” on how creators grow, monetize and engage with their audience, which he believes stands in direct contrast to platforms like Patreon and Substack. And aside from the platform fee (which creators will pay after hitting 2,500 subscribers), Beehiiv doesn’t take a cut.

As Denk said somewhat cheekily on X on April 22, Substack doesn’t offer creators an “owned audience” but instead converts “your audience to their users.”

“If you didn’t like Beehiiv, you could export your emails and move it to MailChimp the next day, or you could take your paid subscriptions and move them anywhere else – you own that relationship with Stripe, not us,” he said. 

It’s that freedom that creators like Ryan Broderick who moved his Garbage Day newsletter over from Substack in 2024 and de la Cretaz find so enticing about Beehiiv. 

“Substack says that you own your email list, but in reality that isn’t fully true,” de la Cretaz said. “And they continue to add more and more features that keep you locked to their platform — like people who subscribe through ApplePay or read only in-app not being included on your export list when you leave…Not only that, the data export from Substack is subpar, and I lost a ton of it.”

Despite all of its benefits, there are still a few things that might prevent creators from moving their entire production to the platform — some of which are beyond Beehiiv’s control.

The podcast associated with Garbage Day, Panic World, is still hosted on Patreon. Broderick says that’s partially a cultural problem, as the podcast world considers Patreon something of a default space for its content. It’s also a payment issue, as Patreon doesn’t use the same Stripe setup that Substack and Beehiiv do. 

“If I wanted to move my Patreon over to Beehiiv, I would have to ask all those customers to start paying again,” he said. “Anyone in the subscription business will tell you that’s a horrible thing to do.”

There are also a few more fan or audience maintenance features that he’d appreciate coming to Beehiiv. 

“I’d like to be able to start a video series for our paid subscribers, where they get to watch it first and then we’ll show the rest to the public,” Broderick said. “There’s just a few things missing where, if we had them, we could build a pretty interesting subscriber-based media business.”