ConvertKit

Kit—formerly ConvertKit, because apparently even email marketing platforms need to rebrand like influencers switching niches—promises to automate your way to creator economy success while you focus on "doing what you love." The testimonials scream premium mediocrity: Grammy winners, New York Times bestsellers, productivity gurus who quit medicine to teach other people productivity. It's the LinkedIn equivalent of name-dropping, except these people actually exist and presumably use this thing. The platform's messaging hits that sweet spot between aspirational and desperate, like a vision board made by someone who definitely has a vision board.

The actual functionality reads like every other email marketing platform that discovered the word "creator" and decided to charge accordingly. You get landing pages, forms, email sequences—the holy trinity of digital snake oil distribution. The "creator-first" positioning feels particularly hollow when you realize this is just Mailchimp wearing a beanie and talking about "building community." They've gamified the hustle with phrases like "Earn more on autopilot" and "Build once, benefit forever," which sounds less like sustainable business advice and more like the tagline for a pyramid scheme documentary waiting to happen.

The automation features genuinely solve real problems—nobody wants to manually send welcome emails at 3 AM—but the pricing structure reveals the platform's true relationship with creators. Like most creator economy tools, Kit extracts its cut through monthly subscriptions that scale with your success, meaning the more money you make, the more they make. It's not egregiously expensive, but it's not cheap either, especially when you're starting out and your "audience" consists of your mom, three college friends, and seventeen bots from various Eastern European countries.

What bothers me most is how Kit packages the exhausting labor of audience building as "growth" and "automation," as if the constant content creation, email scheduling, and subscriber nurturing happens magically in the background. The platform encourages creators to think of their relationships as funnels and their expertise as products to be optimized for conversion rates. There's something deeply depressing about turning every human connection into a potential revenue stream, then using software to make that extraction more efficient.

Still, if you're already committed to monetizing your personality and expertise—and let's be honest, the rent won't pay itself—Kit does what it promises without being actively exploitative. The interface seems clean, the features are comprehensive, and they're not pulling any obvious dark patterns or creator-hostile moves. It's competent capitalism in a space full of predatory capitalism, which counts for something. The platform won't make you rich, but it probably won't make you poor either, assuming you have something worthwhile to sell and the stamina to keep selling it forever.