HeyNews features

A complete list of what you can do in HeyNews.

Account, setup, and dashboard

Get into HeyNews quickly and see what needs attention.

• Flexible sign-in: Sign up with email, add a password, use magic links, or continue with Google.
• Free trial activation: Add a payment method to start the 14-day free trial. The trial includes 5 drafts total, unlimited AI Writers, 5 AI refinements per draft, and 1 publication.
• Onboarding wizard: Connect a newsletter if you're ready, then land on the dashboard while HeyNews trains your AI Writer in the background.
• Dashboard overview: See your AI Writers, sources, stories, saved drafts, recent issue performance, and setup reminders.
• Background setup: After you connect a newsletter, HeyNews keeps building your AI Writer in the background and lets you know when it's ready.

AI Writers

Your AI Writer learns your voice from past issues and writes new drafts that sound like you. You do not have to tune it by hand.

• Automatic voice learning: Connect your newsletter platform and HeyNews reads your past issues to build a voice profile. It picks up your tone, vocabulary, sentence patterns, section structure, and signature phrases on its own.
• Past issue history: See which history sources trained each writer, then request more old issues when you have another archive or export to add.
• Multiple edition types: If your Monday issue is a deep dive and your Friday issue is a link roundup, each gets its own AI Writer trained on the right style.
• Story count per section: Each section of your newsletter can have its own story count, controlling how many stories appear in that part of the issue.
• Learns from performance: If you connect beehiiv or Kit, HeyNews pulls open rates and click-through data after your issues have time to collect engagement, then uses those patterns to improve future drafts.

Compose

The main place where you create your next issue.

• Pick your stories: Browse recent unused stories from your sources, sorted by how relevant each story is to your newsletter. You can include used stories, change the date range, or limit stories per source from Filters. Already-selected stories stay visible even when you adjust those filters.
• Source bulk actions: Use Select all / Deselect all inside a source group to add or remove every visible story from that source.
• Smart Select: Use the "Select Best" button to let AI automatically pick the most relevant stories for each section of your newsletter, respecting the story count you set per section.
• Write a draft: Select an AI Writer, choose the stories you want to cover, and let it write a full draft in your voice.
• Background generation: Start a draft, then navigate away. HeyNews keeps generating in the background, auto-saves the result to your History, and notifies you when it's ready. While you wait in Compose, you'll see the AI Writer, locked input summary, and draft generation context.
• Refine with AI: Tell the AI what to change ("make it shorter," "add more humor," "rewrite the intro") and it revises the draft in real time. Free trial and Hobbyist accounts get 5 refinements per draft, Starter gets 10, Pro gets 20, and Team includes unlimited refinements.
• Unlimited Revisions add-on: If your plan's revision cap isn't enough, add unlimited revisions for $50/month or $420/year from Settings > Subscription. Already included in Team.
• One-click transforms: Shorten, expand, make formal, make casual, simplify, or make more persuasive with a single click.
• Hot takes: Generate a bold, opinionated 2-3 sentence commentary on any story to add personality to your issue.
• Subject line and preview text suggestions: Get AI-written options optimized for open rates.
• Image search: Find and insert images directly from the compose view.
• Save and copy: Save a draft to History, or use Copy to grab the full issue, subject line, or preview text for the email platform where you send your newsletter.

Automations

Automations create HeyNews drafts on a schedule so repeat issues do not require the full Compose flow every time.

• Schedules per publication: Choose the AI Writer, issue day, lead time, time, timezone, and weekly or biweekly cadence.
• Advanced recurrence: Use a weekly recurrence rule when the friendly builder is not enough.
• Fresh-story guardrails: Set minimum stories, maximum stories, date window, and whether used stories can be reused. HeyNews picks the best eligible stories when the automation runs, instead of locking the draft to one fixed source list.
• Automatic draft creation: HeyNews runs Smart Select, writes the draft, creates the subject line and preview text, and saves the result to History.
• Review before send: Automated drafts are never sent or published automatically.
• Notifications: Get an in-app notification and optional email when a draft is ready or an automation needs attention.

Sources and stories

HeyNews checks your sources on a regular schedule and pulls in new stories automatically.

• Content Desk: Use Stories to choose content for the next issue and Sources to manage recurring feeds, saved pages, social profiles, and source health.
• Followed sites: Point HeyNews at any blog or news site. It discovers the RSS feed and starts pulling articles.
• RSS feeds: Subscribe to any public RSS, Atom, or JSON Feed directly. HeyNews keeps checking the rest of your feeds even if one feed has a bad item or temporary error.
• Reddit subreddits: Follow a subreddit as a recurring source, or save one Reddit post as a story when you only need that discussion.
• Profiles: Track thought leaders and accounts across social platforms (Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, TikTok, and more).
• Newsletter platform imports: Past issues from beehiiv or Kit are imported automatically when you connect, and URLs inside each broadcast get picked up as new sources too.
• Paste any link: Add a feed URL, article URL, website URL, subreddit, or social profile and HeyNews figures out the right source type when it can.
• Manual stories: Use Content Desk > Add > Add a story to save a one-off link, note, or idea.
• Story selection from Content Desk: Open Stories, choose the stories you want, and click Use these to open Compose with those stories prefilled.
• Relevance scoring: Every story gets a relevance score so you can quickly see what matters most to your audience.
• Search and filter: Search stories and sources, then filter stories by All, New, or Saved.

Integrations

Connect your newsletter platform, RSS feeds, and browser to HeyNews.

• beehiiv: Connect with your API key to import past issues, update subscriber counts, and pull performance data.
• Kit (ConvertKit): Approve the connection through Kit to import broadcasts and track performance.
• Newsletter archive: Connect newsletters from Substack, Ghost, Mailchimp, ActiveCampaign, Medium, or any platform with a public archive. HeyNews finds and imports your past issues so it can learn your voice, with no API key required.
• RSS feeds: Subscribe to any feed. HeyNews also has a built-in feed discovery tool that tries multiple methods to find the right feed URL.
• Browser extension: Save articles from any webpage with one click. The extension extracts the text and sends it straight to your HeyNews sources.
• Connections page: View connected beehiiv, Kit, and archive accounts, check whether they're up to date, add more connections, or disconnect accounts you no longer use.

Analytics

See how your newsletters are doing.

• Open rate, click-through rate, unsubscribe rate, bounce rate: All in one dashboard.
• Charts: Grouped bar charts for recent performance, a dual-line trend chart with average reference lines, a color-intensity heatmap for best send times, and horizontal bars for top performers.
• Flexible time ranges: View performance over the last 7, 30, or 90 days, or the past year. The full year view shows up to 52 weeks of trend data.
• Recipient trends: Get a heads up if your subscriber count is declining.
• Best send time: A heatmap shows which weekdays and hours get the best open rates for your audience.
• Per-issue breakdown: Drill into individual issues to see what worked and what didn't.
• Request a direct connection: If you connected with a public archive, you can ask us from the Analytics page to add performance tracking for your platform.

History

All your drafts in one place.

• Browse and search: See every draft with its subject line, preview text, AI Writer, stories used count, last saved time, and badges.
• Quick actions: Open a draft in Compose or delete it.

Publications

Manage multiple newsletters from a single account.

• Separate everything: Each publication gets its own AI Writers, sources, stories, and settings.
• One beehiiv or Kit connection, one publication: Each beehiiv or Kit connection gets its own publication. Newsletter archives attach to your current publication as voice history, so they don't create a new publication or use another paid connection.
• Quick switching: Jump between publications from the sidebar.
• Per-publication settings: Set the name, timezone, language, and default send time for each newsletter independently.
• Archive and restore: Retire a publication you no longer use from the Publications page. Archived publications stay recoverable for 30 days before being permanently deleted.

Settings

Profile

Update your name, display name, and bio.

Notifications

Choose which emails you receive and review important account updates from the in-app notification inbox.

Subscription and billing

• Four plans for different publishing volumes: Hobbyist ($39/mo, 5 issues), Starter ($99/mo, 15 issues, 2 publications), Pro ($299/mo, 45 issues, 4 publications), Team ($499/mo, 90 issues, unlimited revisions, 10 publications)
• Yearly billing saves 30% on any plan
• 14-day free trial after a payment method is added, with 5 drafts total, 5 AI refinements per draft, unlimited AI Writers, and 1 publication
• Add-ons attach to paid plans: Unlimited AI Revisions ($50/mo or $420/yr), issue packs (+10/+20/+30 issues/mo), and publication packs (+1/+2/+5 publications/mo)
• Upgrade nudges: when your add-on spend nears the next tier's price, the app shows an upgrade prompt so you don't overpay for extras
• When your trial ends, your account is paused: HeyNews stops checking sources and newsletter generation is disabled until you subscribe to a plan
• Change plans, switch billing cycles, add or remove add-ons, update payment methods, and view invoices from Settings > Subscription

Security

Change your password from Settings > Security.

Security

Security in HeyNews covers three things: account access, connection details, and the content inside each publication.

• Passwords stay private: HeyNews does not store your password where our team can read it.
• Connection details are encrypted: beehiiv API keys and Kit connection tokens are encrypted before storage. They are never shown back in the app, and even the HeyNews team cannot read them.
• No platform passwords required: Kit lets you approve the connection without sharing your Kit password. Newsletter archive connections only need a public archive URL or RSS feed.
• Read-only newsletter access: HeyNews imports your past issues, source content, subscriber counts, and performance metrics. It does not send newsletters, change subscribers, or edit content in your email platform.
• Publication separation: Each publication keeps its AI Writers, sources, stories, drafts, integrations, settings, and analytics separate from your other publications.
• Your data trains your writers only: Your past issues, sources, stories, and drafts are used to generate and improve your own HeyNews drafts, not another user's AI Writer.
• Connection control: Disconnect beehiiv, Kit, archive, RSS, and source connections when you no longer want HeyNews to check them for new data.
• Data cleanup: Archive a publication from the Publications page when you no longer need it. You can restore it for 30 days before it is permanently deleted.

Referral program

Earn rewards by sharing HeyNews with other newsletter writers. Get a personal referral link, track conversions, and see your earnings from the Refer and Earn page.

Browser extension

A Chrome extension for saving articles on the go, available on the Chrome Web Store.

• Save as story: Add the current article directly to your Stories library with one click.
• Follow this site: Add the site's homepage as an ongoing source so future articles get picked up automatically.
• Clean article text: The extension grabs the article content and turns it into clean text.
• Clear error messages: If a page can't be saved (unsupported layout, network issue, expired session), the extension tells you exactly what happened.
• Dark mode: Follows your system theme.
• Quick links: Jump to your HeyNews dashboard from the extension popup.

Growth audit reward

Once your subscription is active, leave an honest review of HeyNews on G2 and earn a free growth audit. Click the gift icon in the sidebar to visit the claim page, upload a screenshot of your review, and we'll review your submission within a few business days. If the HeyNews team has granted plan access to your workspace, that counts too.