Curated.co alternatives for link roundup newsletters

If you publish a link roundup on Curated, you have probably had the same thought at some point in the past year or two. The tool still works. It also has not visibly changed, and the newsletter world around it has changed a great deal. Looking for a new home is a nuisance, and picking the wrong one means doing all of this twice, so it is worth being honest about what the realistic options are and what each costs you in habits, features and admin.

Why people look for a Curated alternative.

People leave Curated over its direction, not because it has stopped working. Dave Verwer built the platform to publish his own roundup, iOS Dev Weekly, then opened it up to other curators, and for years it defined what a link newsletter tool should be. He sold it to Litmus, the email testing company, in 2016, and it has changed hands again since. The signs of the years in between are not hard to find. At the time of writing, in August 2026, the homepage still quotes a customer weighing Curated against Revue, a rival that Twitter closed in January 2023, and the support articles carry last-updated dates from 2021. None of this stops next week's issue going out. It does tell you roughly what the next few years of the product will look like.

What a link roundup needs from its platform.

A roundup lives or dies on five things: somewhere for links to pile up during the week, a composer that treats an issue as sections of links with your take on each one, an archive that builds under your own name, a sensible home for sponsorship admin and a clean way out. The last item is the one Curated has taught you to value. A clean way out means your subscriber list exports in full and your archive does not vanish the day you stop paying, and you should judge every option below against it, ours included.

How the five compare.

Five platforms, judged on the things a roundup actually uses rather than on price, because prices change and capabilities mostly do not.

Issue Mint.

Issue Mint is our product, so weigh this section accordingly. It exists because the format Curated defined deserved a tool that is still being worked on, and the weekly shape is the one you already have: a browser button saves links into a library as you read, readers can send you links that land in the same place, and on send day you drag the good ones into sections and write a line on each. How the composer handles a week of saved links is the closest thing to a straight swap in this post. Sending is included with nothing to connect, and when the newsletter turns into a business you can take the sending into your own hands at no extra cost, so the reputation you build belongs to you rather than to us. Sponsorship gets real admin instead of an inbox thread: slot types with prices, a calendar sponsors book against themselves and confirmed bookings waiting in the composer on the right date. Billing is monthly on active readers, from $19, and unsubscribed or bounced addresses do not count towards it.

beehiiv.

beehiiv is the growth machine. Built by early Morning Brew people, it carries the tooling that team wished they had: referral programmes, paid recommendations, an advertising marketplace and reporting on everything. If the ambition is a media business, it is the serious general-purpose option. What it lacks is a link library. The composer is a block editor, an issue is a document you write rather than a set of links you collected, and the save-as-you-read habit has to live in your bookmarks instead. Roundups run on beehiiv; they just get no special treatment.

Substack.

Substack's offer is the network rather than the tool. Publishing is free, the app and the recommendation system put your publication in front of other writers' readers, and if you charge for subscriptions Substack takes a cut of that revenue instead of a monthly fee. The catch for a roundup is the editor, which is built for essays. A link is just a link inside a post, with no library, no link sections and no per-link report afterwards. Plenty of digests live happily there anyway, usually because the writer values discovery above the writing experience, which is a defensible trade.

Buttondown.

Buttondown is the small, independent one. You write each issue as a single piece of text, the templates stay out of the way and the whole product is deliberately minimal, which for a certain kind of curator is precisely the appeal. Nothing collects links for you and there is no sponsorship tooling, so both of those live elsewhere. If your roundup is short, personal and allergic to dashboards, it deserves a look.

Ghost.

Ghost is a full publication rather than a newsletter tool. You get a website, memberships, paid subscriptions and email in one open-source system run by a non-profit, hosted by them or by you. That is the right amount of machinery when the newsletter is one strand of a bigger publication, and clearly too much when the newsletter is the whole thing. Nothing in it knows what a link roundup is.

Before you move anywhere.

Do four checks before moving a newsletter off Curated, in the order they bite. First, export your subscriber list today, whatever you decide, and check the count matches what your dashboard says; the list is the only part of a newsletter that cannot be rebuilt. Second, import only your active readers into the new home, because carrying bounced and unsubscribed addresses to a fresh sender is how deliverability problems start. Third, decide what happens to the old archive. Past issues do not import anywhere on this list, so if the archive earns search traffic, leave it online at its current address and let the new one build from your next issue. Fourth, send the first issue to yourself before the list, because no template survives contact with a new platform unchanged.

When Issue Mint is the wrong choice.

Issue Mint is the wrong choice if readers paying you directly is the plan, because it does not do paid subscriptions. Curated supports them, and if that is where your revenue comes from, Substack or Ghost fits the shape far better than we do. It is also the wrong choice if what you mostly write is essays, since the composer is built around links with commentary attached and a two-thousand-word read sits awkwardly in it. And if you want one system running an entire website, that is Ghost's job, not ours. Sponsorship is the revenue model Issue Mint takes seriously; if your roundup earns a different way, weigh that honestly.

Weigh it against Curated directly.

If the decision has narrowed to staying put or moving here, read the feature-by-feature comparison of Issue Mint and Curated, which includes an honest list of the situations where Curated remains the better choice. Whichever way you go, do the export first. It takes a minute, it costs nothing, and it turns a platform decision back into something you are choosing rather than something that might one day be chosen for you.