A newsletter platform without growth hacks, recommendation engines, or a feed. Just an editor that gets out of your way, an audience you actually own, and a reading experience built for the kind of pieces that take six drafts to get right.
“A newsletter is a private channel between one writer and a few hundred readers. Treat it with that respect.”
Source Serif at 19 pixels. A 64-character measure. No toolbar floating in your face. Markdown if you want it, keyboard shortcuts if you need them, and an autosave that ships every 14 seconds. We don't show word counts unless you ask. We don't suggest titles. We don't run grammar checks. You're not writing tweets.
Drafts are versioned forever. Revert any paragraph to its state on any date. Export the whole archive as a single, valid EPUB whenever you like.
Open rate, reply rate, churn. That's the dashboard. No engagement scores, no virality multipliers, no notifications when someone leaves. You can dig into a city map of your readers if you want — it's behind two clicks. The default is a single page that takes 14 seconds to scan.
Import from Substack, beehiiv, Ghost, or Mailchimp with one CSV. We re-verify every address on the way in, so you don't ship your first issue into a graveyard.
Export the full subscriber list at any time — with timestamps, source, and verified status — as a CSV you can carry to any other tool tomorrow. No "data portability tier." No locked features for paying customers. The migration is one button. We've had 38 writers leave for other platforms; we kept their referrals on file as a courtesy.
Custom domains on every plan. We host the DNS. You hold the contract.
Both plans include custom domains, unlimited issues, full export, and a hand-written welcome from our editor. No 10% cut on paid subscriptions, ever.
For the writer with a list under one thousand. Everything you need, nothing you don't.
When the list is serious enough that the platform fee starts to bite. Removes every cap.
“I moved 4,208 subscribers off Substack in an afternoon. My open rate climbed 18 points the same week — same list, different posture.”
“No feed, no notifications, no nudges. I forget Manuscript exists between issues, which is exactly the point.”
“The editor feels like a typewriter that remembers everything. First tool that's let me write at length again.”
“I cancelled three other subscriptions to pay $39. The platform fee math alone made it back in eleven days.”
We pull your subscriber list and your paying customers via the Substack export. Stripe customers transfer with payment methods intact — no one has to re-enter a card. The full migration averages 38 minutes; the longest on record was three hours.
An app introduces a feed; a feed pits writers against one another for attention. We decided that trade-off wasn't worth it. The reading experience on web and email is the same — Source Serif, 64-character measure, no chrome.
We send from dedicated IP pools warmed per publication. Median inbox placement across Gmail, Outlook, Fastmail, and iCloud is 98.4% on lists over 50K. SPF, DKIM, DMARC, and BIMI are configured on every custom domain at setup — there's nothing for you to copy-paste.
Yes. No "powered by" badge on either plan. Your domain, your design tokens (we expose 28 CSS variables), your name on the masthead. We don't put our logo in your reader's inbox.
A 90-day sunset commitment is written into our terms. You'd receive a full export — subscribers, issues as standards-compliant HTML and EPUB, paid customers as a Stripe portable bundle — plus six months of email forwarding on your custom domain at no cost.
14-day trial, no card. Migrate from your current platform in one afternoon. Our editor reviews every new publication personally — usually within 18 hours.