What's new — March 26, 2026

Full newsletter editor

The Compose page now has a proper editor. Instead of writing in a text box and previewing separately, you get a toolbar with formatting, headings, lists, alignment, links, and images. There's a full-screen mode, a visual/markdown toggle, and a status bar showing word count and reading time.

Subject line and preview text now have their own fields at the top, each with a copy button.

AI-generated subject lines and preview text

After you generate a newsletter draft, HeyNews suggests a subject line and preview text based on the content. Hit "Suggest both" anytime to get a fresh pair. The suggestions improve as HeyNews learns from your past performance data.

Your newsletters get smarter over time

HeyNews now learns from your newsletter performance and adjusts its writing for you.

Here's what it picks up on:

  • Subject line patterns. Which formats get opened more? Questions vs. statements, short vs. long, with or without names. You'll see specific insights like "Questions outperform statements by 15% for your audience."
  • Story selection. Topics your readers click on get prioritized. Topics that correlate with unsubscribes get flagged.
  • Content length and structure. If your best-performing issues tend to be shorter or have more sections, the AI adjusts.
  • Trends over time. If open rates are climbing or dipping, that context gets factored into the next draft.
  • Audience retention. If subscriber count drops more than 10%, you'll see a heads-up on the Analytics page.

The Compose page shows a badge after generation: either "Learning from X issues" (when there's enough data) or "Publish N more to activate optimization" (when there isn't yet).

Best time to send

A new card on the Analytics page shows which days and times get the best open rates for your newsletters, based on your actual send history.

Draft History

All your past drafts live on the new History page (sidebar link). You can preview, rename, delete, or re-open any draft in the Compose editor to keep working on it.

Yearly billing

You can now switch to annual billing from Settings > Subscription. Pricing shows both the total monthly cost and the per-newsletter breakdown, with yearly equivalents. Stripe handles the proration automatically when you switch.

Refer & Earn

New sidebar link. Refer other newsletter creators to HeyNews and earn affiliate commissions. The page shows your referral link, stats, and payouts in one place.

One draft, one generation

The Regenerate button is gone. Each draft gets one AI generation. After that, you refine it yourself in the editor or with the AI chat. This keeps the workflow simple: pick your stories, pick your AI writer, generate, then edit.

Fixes

  • Training failed for daily newsletters with lots of content. Newsletters with 15+ issues in a cluster were sending too much text to the AI, causing garbled output. HeyNews now caps the input and retries with less content if the first attempt fails.
  • Dashboard stuck on "Waiting for Admin Approval." Some AI writers were created without the right workspace link, so the dashboard couldn't find them even after approval. Fixed on both the save and query side.
  • Editing a draft from History created a duplicate. Opening a past draft in Compose and saving it made a new copy instead of updating the original. It updates correctly now.
  • Connections page showed IDs instead of newsletter names. Publication names now display properly, along with accurate subscriber and issue counts.
  • beehiiv posts showed up in History. Published issues from beehiiv were leaking into the History page through a shared cache. History now only shows your Compose drafts.