What's new: April 17, 2026

Analytics got real charts

The Analytics page rebuilt its visuals. Recent Performance is now a grouped bar chart with open and click rates side by side. Weekly Trend is a dual-line area chart with average reference lines. Best Send Times is a color-intensity heatmap. Top Performers keeps bars but on an honest 0-100% scale.

We also fixed a bug where click rates were multiplied by 5 to make them comparable to open rates. The numbers you see now are the real numbers.

Background newsletter generation

Start a generation, navigate away, keep working. HeyNews now auto-saves the finished draft to your History and shows a toast when it's ready. You'll see a "New" badge on the saved draft. If you return to Compose while generation is still running, a progress banner appears so you know it's working.

Chat revision limit and Unlimited Revisions add-on

Each draft now allows up to 20 refinement messages in the AI chat panel. You'll see a counter in the chat header. Hit the cap, and you'll see a prompt for the new Unlimited Revisions add-on.

Add or remove the add-on at any time from Settings > Subscription > Add-ons.

Request analytics support for your newsletter platform

If you connected via a public archive (Substack, Ghost, Mailchimp, and so on), your Analytics page now offers a form to request direct integration support for your platform. Submit once, and the form turns into a thank-you message on subsequent visits so you don't have to resubmit.

Archive and restore publications

Publications you no longer use can now be archived from the Publications page. Archiving stops source syncs and hides the publication from your sidebar, but the data stays for 30 days in case you change your mind. Restore anytime within the window. After 30 days, everything is permanently deleted.

Growth Audit reward

Leave an honest review of HeyNews on G2 and get a free growth audit ($99 value). A gift icon in the sidebar links to the claim page, where you upload a screenshot of your review as proof. We approve claims within a few business days.

Add a story from any URL

From the Stories tab, paste an article URL, and HeyNews fetches, summarizes, and saves it as a story you can use in your next newsletter. This works well for one-off articles that aren't from your connected sources.

The Chrome extension now splits this into two actions: Save as story (for one article) and Follow this site (which adds the homepage as an ongoing source).

Sources page labels are clearer

Same functionality, better names:

  • "Saved Pages" → "Followed Sites"
  • "RSS" → "Articles"
  • "Feeds" → "RSS Feeds"
  • "Social" → "Profiles"
  • "Add Blog URL" → "Follow a Site"
  • "Add Social Profile" → "Follow a Profile"

Sign in with any method, regardless of how you signed up

Signed up with Google? You can now also sign in with a magic link or password. Signed up with email? You can use Google later too. All three methods work for every account.

If an existing user tries to sign up again, they no longer hit a dead-end error. Instead, a friendly "Welcome Back" screen offers to send them a sign-in link.

When HeyNews extracts a story from a beehiiv or Kit broadcast, it now also scans article links within that broadcast (up to 10 per issue) and queues them for extraction. Your content pool grows deeper without any extra setup.

Connect archives that don't play nice

Some newsletter archives (especially ones that load content dynamically) would silently fail auto-discovery. We added a 4th discovery stage that scrapes the archive page directly, plus a manual connection option for when everything else fails, so you can connect with zero imported issues and start training on new content as it arrives.

If you paste a sub-page URL, such as yoursite.com/archive, and a discovery fails, HeyNews now retries against the host root before giving up.

Fixes

  • Smart Select now respects each section's story count. It was picking a fixed 2-3 stories per section, regardless of what you set. Now, a section set to 5 stories gets 5.
  • "Last Year" dropdown now shows a full year of data. The weekly trend chart was silently capped at 8 weeks. It now scales up to 52 weeks.
  • Stripe Checkout showed "13 days free" instead of 14. A rounding issue knocked a day off. Fixed.
  • The newsletter opt-in checkbox was ignored at signup. If you unchecked "subscribe to HeyNews newsletter" during email signup, we were still subscribing you anyway. It now respects your choice.
  • Voice matching got better for beehiiv users. Training was cutting off the tail of most issues at 6,000 characters. It now retries up to 15,000 before backing off, so the AI learns from your full writing style, not just your intros.
  • First-time Compose users had no AI Writer selected. Relevance scores stayed blank until you picked an AI Writer manually. Your latest approved AI Writer now auto-selects on first visit.
  • Dashboard said "Start AI Training" even while training was running. It now shows "AI Training Underway" with a spinner.
  • Publications named "Publication pub_xxx". Real names now fetch from beehiiv at connect time. Legacy connections display as "Unnamed Publication" until the next performance sync corrects them.
  • Admin-granted Pro accounts were getting the trial-expired block screen. Admin-granted subscriptions now skip the trial and credit card screens entirely.
  • Generation silently failed when a preview AI model was unavailable. If the newer AI model refused the request, generation stopped cold. It now automatically falls back to the stable model.
  • Stale data briefly showed after switching publications. When you swapped between publications mid-session, data from the previous one could flash on screen. State now resets cleanly.