Joyful 2025 Recap

Happy holidays, all!

Joyful launched this year due to my frustration with the other options out there. Between platforms hosting controversial people, huge expensive fees for basic features, and a labyrinthian maze of gotchas, I grew tired of looking and trying.

Going into 2026, my guiding principle remains the same: writing beautiful newsletters should be joyful.

Joyful to write.

Joyful to send.

Joyful to read.

And this past month there was a flurry of updates that were placed into Joyful, many of which came from users in order to pursue that goal. Overall, the following features were rolled out:

• Email personalization
• Web-only and email-only content visibility controls
• Custom CSS styling for newsletters and templates
• Tag management and auto-tagging subscribers
• Resend verification emails for pending subscribers
• Disable link tracking per publication
• Send without publishing option
• Google Sign-in and Automated Google Drive backups
• Headless CMS API for Pro users
• Full documentation site
• Changelog

Feel free to click through and dive into some of the goodies of each — I hope you like them!

I’ll keep the update relatively short since I am just excited to keep building and talking to each of you. (Also, almost everyone is sending end-of-year recaps at this point and I want to make it easy on you)

So, going into 2026, let’s keep writing, reading, and making joyful things!

Cheers and Happy New Year! 🥳

Ian