Guide
How to find good newsletters
There are more newsletters than ever, spread across Substack, beehiiv, Ghost, Kit and independent sites, and none of these platforms makes it easy to search the others. Here is how to find the ones worth your inbox.
1. Search by what you care about, not by platform
Most people find newsletters through one platform's recommendations, which means they only ever see that platform. A topic you care about is usually covered by writers on four or five different services. letterradar indexes all of them in one place: describe what you want in plain words, like "climate tech for investors" or "indie game development", and the search matches on meaning, not just keywords.
2. Browse a topic when you don't know what you want yet
If you want to explore, start from a topic page. Each one lists the best-written active newsletters in that area, with a short description of what each covers and how often it publishes. Browse all topics, or jump straight to AI, personal finance, history or software engineering.
3. Follow the recommendations of writers you already like
Many newsletters recommend others at signup or on a recommendations page. A writer you trust is a good filter: the newsletters they recommend tend to share their standards. Our own crawler follows these recommendations too, which is how we discover many small, high-quality newsletters that no directory lists.
4. Check these five signs before you subscribe
- It publishes on a schedule. Check the archive. A newsletter that has gone quiet for three months is not coming back next week, however good the old issues are.
- Each issue says something new. Good writers do their own reading, reporting or analysis. If an issue is mostly links you have already seen, it is a digest, which is fine, but know that is what you are signing up for.
- The writer knows the field. The best newsletters come from practitioners: engineers writing about engineering, investors about markets, doctors about medicine. Look for an about page and a track record.
- You can read it before subscribing. A public web archive is a good sign. It lets you judge the writing first, and it means the writer is confident in it.
- The length fits your week. A weekly long read and a daily five-minute digest serve different readers. Pick the format you will actually open.
On letterradar every newsletter has a profile with the platform, publishing frequency, date of the latest issue and a short summary, so you can check most of these without leaving the page. The star rating reflects writing quality, judged from recent issues, not popularity.
5. Keep your inbox under control
Subscribe to fewer newsletters than you think you want. Try one for a month, and if you skipped most issues, unsubscribe without guilt. Many readers keep newsletters out of their main inbox with a filter or a separate address, and read them in one sitting once a week.
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