What Issue Mint does not do

Issue Mint publishes curated link newsletters, and quite a lot of what other email platforms do is deliberately absent. This page is the list, so you can rule the product out in five minutes rather than three days.

Nothing here is a hidden limitation. Everything on the page is a decision, and most of the decisions are about keeping the composer narrow enough to be quick on send day.

No paid subscriptions or paywalls

Issue Mint runs free-to-read newsletters only. There are no paid reader tiers, no paywalled issues, no member-only archive and no way to collect money from a reader.

Every subscriber on a list receives every issue, and every issue you send is public on your archive website the moment it goes out. If your plan is to charge readers, Substack, Ghost and beehiiv all do that and Issue Mint does not.

One person per account

An account has one login and one email address. There are no team seats, no collaborator invitations, no roles and no permissions.

A newsletter run by two people usually runs on one shared login and a shared mailbox, because that address is where every notification goes. There is also no two-factor authentication and no single sign-on, so your password is the only thing standing in front of the account.

No automations, sequences or autoresponders

Issue Mint sends what you write, when you say. There is no welcome sequence, no drip series, no re-send to people who did not open, no birthday mail and no trigger-based anything.

The only email Issue Mint sends a reader on its own is the double opt-in confirmation and its one reminder. Everything else in their inbox from you is an issue you pressed send on, or scheduled.

Every issue goes to everybody active

An issue goes to every active subscriber on its newsletter. There is no segmented send, no subject-line A/B test and no send-time optimisation per reader.

Engagement segments do exist on the subscriber list, so you can see who has been reading and export a filtered list, but they filter the screen rather than the send. There are also no merge fields: Issue Mint stores a first name when a signup form or a CSV provides one, and nothing in an issue substitutes it, so no issue can say “Hello Ada”.

One template, and markdown rather than HTML

Every newsletter uses the same issue and website template, taking your logo, your colour and a font pairing. There is no theme gallery, no HTML template editor and no custom CSS.

Your commentary is written in markdown, and raw HTML inside it is escaped rather than rendered, on your website and in the email alike. That is what makes one issue safe to publish as an email and as a web page at the same time, and it is also why a pixel-perfect design from somewhere else cannot be brought over.

Money for sponsorship changes hands without us

Issue Mint runs the inventory and the enquiries. It does not process a payment, issue an invoice, chase one or take a percentage.

You price your dates, a sponsor asks for the ones they want, and you agree terms and get paid however you already get paid. There is no sponsor login either: a sponsor cannot upload their own creative, so what runs in your issue is what you put there, which is covered in what you sell.

Very little else plugs into Issue Mint

The extension API is the only API Issue Mint has, and it exists so that a browser can save a link. There is no public REST API, no outgoing webhooks, no Zapier app, and nothing posts to social networks or the fediverse when an issue goes out.

The extension itself is a Chrome extension, with no Firefox, Edge or Safari build, no bookmarklet and no mobile app. On any other browser, pasting a URL into the composer does the same look-up from our side. What does come out of Issue Mint is a feed: every newsletter website publishes RSS, which covers most of what an integration would have been for.

Billing is monthly, in US dollars

Plans are billed monthly in US dollars, one plan per account rather than one per newsletter. There is no annual plan, no discount for paying ahead, no lifetime deal and no free tier once the trial ends.

The price ladder is worked out from how many people read you across every newsletter on the account, and it moves on its own in both directions, so there is nothing to negotiate and nothing to remember to change.