🐝 New stack.

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We moved to beehiiv in a week and cut ~$15k a year. Here’s how to do the same.

Moving a newsletter usually goes like Ross moving his couch: lots of “PIVOT!” and something breaks.

We just moved STACKED MARKETER, PSYCHOLOGY OF MARKETING, [TACTICS] and STACKED MARKETER PRO to beehiiv, a creator platform where you can write, grow and earn from your newsletter in one place.

We left behind an ESP with ~70k unique contacts and a WordPress website held together by plugins.

Why we moved: Our old ESP kept raising prices while its features fell behind.

On top of it, we paid separately for the website and memberships.

beehiiv puts email, website, and paid subscriptions in one place, with community and podcasts if you want them. That’s simpler to run and cheaper: ~$15k a year cheaper for us.

What we got on top:

Whether you run a newsletter business or send your company’s email, the moves are the same.

1) Give every newsletter one home. Set up one publication and make each newsletter its own newsletter list.

The Crew’s tip: With separate publications, a reader on three newsletters is billed three times. Roughly 30% of our old subscriber count was duplicates.

One catch: a reader who switches off their last list in their preferences stays subscribed. Add an automation that unsubscribes them.

2) Bring your readers over. Export your list and import it as a CSV. Name your columns utm_source, utm_medium and so on, and beehiiv stores each reader’s acquisition data automatically.

The import gives everyone today’s signup date, so create two custom fields first:

Put both in one final file with one row per reader, and run it last. A later import can overwrite custom fields.

The Crew’s tip: Ask beehiiv support to copy your Date field onto the real signup date. No history lost.

CSV imports also skip welcome emails, so loyal readers won’t get welcomed to a newsletter they’ve read for years.

3) Keep the inboxes you’ve earned. Connect your own sending domain and keep the exact same sender address. Readers have years of filters and safe-sender rules tied to it.

beehiiv turns on Smart Warming by default. It splits your sends between your domain and a beehiiv address, then shifts them to your domain over a few weeks.

The Crew’s tip: Smart Warming is very useful for new domains. Established newsletters with strong deliverability are better off without it, so ask support to switch it off.

4) Move your website. beehiiv’s website builder hosts your site on your own domain, with your archive, landing pages, and signup forms in one place.

No more plugin updates or a separate hosting bill.

5) Move your paid members. Connect a new Stripe account to beehiiv. Stripe copies your customers and saved cards into it, and beehiiv’s paid subscriber import recreates their subscriptions.

Members keep their price and billing date, and nobody re-enters a card. beehiiv takes 0% of your subscription revenue.

Claude matched each of our old plans to a beehiiv tier and gave every member the right access, team seats included.

The Crew’s tip: Brand the new Stripe account first, because receipts come from Stripe. Keep your old subscriptions paused, not cancelled, until one full billing cycle runs on beehiiv.

6) Let Claude do the heavy lifting. The import is the easy part. Rebuilding everything around it eats the time.

That rebuild is why we didn’t move sooner. Done by hand, the labor would have eaten almost our entire first year of savings.

beehiiv’s MCP server connects AI assistants like Claude straight to your account. Claude rebuilt our templates, set up our automations and built our website pages.

It also imported our archive, reformatting each issue to fit. Where the MCP stopped, Claude in Chrome clicked through the rest.

The MCP turned months of work into a week. With a simpler setup than ours, expect even less.

And the big worry? For any newsletter, the scariest part of a migration is deliverability and engagement.

One month in, ours are just as good as before, plus all the benefits we moved for.

You’re supposed to pick two out of fast, cheap, and good. We got all three.

You can also get it: Try beehiiv free for 14 days, no card needed, then use code SM30 for 30% off your first three months.