Mailchimp is shutting TinyLetter, a service that I loved that let individuals easily write and publish simple but nice-looking email newsletters. The service will be discontinued on February 29th, 2024, according to a message I see when logged into my TinyLetter account.

If you’re a current TinyLetter user and you log into your account, you’ll see a message from Mailchimp reminding you to export your data before the shutdown and encouraging you to try Mailchimp proper. But while TinyLetter, which is free, lets users send emails to as many as 5,000 subscribers, Mailchimp’s free tier only allows for 1,000 “monthly email sends,” according to Mailchimp’s pricing page. Depending on how big your subscriber list is, migrating to Mailchimp may not be the best option.

Mailchimp sent The Verge a statement about the closure from Jon Fasoli, Mailchimp’s chief design and product officer:

Intuit Mailchimp recently announced its decision to sunset TinyLetter and focus on our core Mailchimp marketing product. 

In 2011, Mailchimp acquired a small newsletter service called TinyLetter to expand our offerings and make it easy for people to send updates, digests, and dispatches to their fans and friends. Over the years, TinyLetter took on a life of its own, and we’ve loved watching our users share their work and build communities around their newsletters. 

Since then, our business priorities have evolved, and we’ve been laser-focused on building tools to serve marketers and help small businesses grow. The TinyLetter community’s needs have changed too, with some customers moving to Mailchimp to scale and monetize their newsletters, and some moving to alternative services that cater specifically to writers. With all of that in mind, we’ve made the decision to close TinyLetter on February 29, 2024. 

We’ve given customers advance notice about these changes, and our Customer team is happy to work with them to set up a Mailchimp account or transfer their data to the service that works best for them. 

Earlier on Wednesday, a user on X (formerly Twitter) shared a screenshot of a similar message from the company.

Personally, I’m sad to see TinyLetter go. While I haven’t written a TinyLetter email in years, I enjoyed how it made the act of writing and publishing a clean newsletter really easy. RIP TinyLetter.

TinyLetter shutdown follows Intuit’s acquisition of Mailchimp, which was completed in 2021. In 2018, the company had to assuage fears that it was planning to make changes to the platform that year, though Ben Chestnut, Mailchimp’s CEO at the time (and who is also a co-founder of the company), did say that “in the long term, we do intend to integrate TinyLetter into MailChimp.”

Update November 29th, 3:41PM ET: Added statement from Mailchimp.