Sep 22, 2025
The Rise of Newsletters
Newsletters have absolutely exploded over the past decade. What started as a hobby project for researchers and internet bloggers has evolved into a full-fledged industry since the COVID-19 pandemic.
Today, you can find a newsletter about almost anything and everything: from best shopping tips to how to raise kids or gardening tips for suburban dads and moms. On hot topics such as AI, entrepreneurship, and blockchain, you have dozens, if not hundreds, of emails, all promising to give you either keep you up with the latest on that subject or teach you the ‘secrets’ of it.
There is no doubt that newsletters are now a large market. According to a University of Oxford study 17% of internet users say they use newsletters weekly. This equates to around 900 million individuals engaging with a newsletter one way or another every week.
The Problem
Meanwhile, there are tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of newsletters out there, all trying to grab attention and get your email address. The volume is overwhelming, if not unbearable.
For those who enjoy newsletters, there is a clear dilemma: how to deal with this volume and make the best out of your online learning experience? There are too many publishers to choose from, and your inbox becomes an absolute mess after only a few weeks.
Unread emails start piling up, it gets more difficult to find what you are looking for, and you start feeling guilty about all the newsletters that you haven’t even had a chance to open yet. Overall, what starts as a passionate learning commitment, say about AI or tech trends, turns into an inbox chaos that ends up draining your energy.
It is a common occurrence, if you are an average internet user, to log into your inbox on a Monday morning and see a barrage of emails from coworkers, clients, prospects, news outlets, various bills, and on top of all of these, dozens of emails from various newsletters you signed up for over the past couple of weeks. You were hoping to learn from each and every one of them, but instead, you are now looking at a cluttered inbox.
Even when you manage to keep up with all the newsletters that you receive, it becomes difficult to track what you have been reading, find the information you are looking for in previous issues, or discover similar content that expands your horizon on the subject that you are interested in. You are keeping up with the volume, but you are also missing out on a proper, structured learning opportunity.
The Solution: The Bilig Way
That’s the reason behind Bilig. We love newsletters, and we enjoy learning from different creators on different subjects. But we want a pleasant learning journey instead of an inbox chaos paired with guilt and energy drain. We prefer newsletters to be something that improves our productivity rather than being a drag on it
.
We have built Bilig on several principles that will boost your productivity:
1-) Organised inbox for all newsletters: There is no study on this, but in our experience, around half of all newsletters are sent daily. Signing up for five daily newsletters means 35 emails in your inbox every week.
That’s a lot. And almost impossible to neatly organise in your inbox.
Instead, Bilig offers a single inbox for newsletters where they are categorised neatly and managed from a single dashboard. You have a clear view of your unread newsletters while maintaining a library based on each author.
This clears your personal email from all the volume and lets you separate your personal email needs from your learning experience.
2-) Discover credible newsletters in one platform: You see this artificial intelligence thing taking off, some say that you may lose your job because of ChatGPT and other LLMs, the news says big tech companies are now spending hundreds of billions of dollars into it.
You decide to check what all the buzz is about and make sure you are on top of the latest about AI. But there is a problem: there are hundreds to choose from, and you don’t even know where to begin.
That is why Bilig has a dedicated ‘Discover’ section. We are hand-picking hundreds of newsletters across six categories and dozens of different subjects, so you have one newsletter directory that you can rely on.
We are committed to growing this list with ever more credible newsletters to make sure our users can have access to high-quality content that will make a positive impact to their online learning experience.
And the best part is, we are not hiding this directory behind a paywall, or even a password wall!
It will be freely accessible to everyone on the front section of our website for anyone to access. Our aim is to help everyone who is seeking information.
3-) Utilising AI, but in a smart way: Speaking of AI… We know it is everywhere at the moment, and you may even have your doubts about every new product that claims to be ‘AI-powered’.
But we think AI’s clearest use case is summarising a large chunk of information in a digestible way. There is a massive untapped opportunity in the newsletters and wider learning space to utilise AI to turbocharge the learning experience.
If you are having a busy week and don’t have the time to read multiple newsletters, having an AI-powered, personalised digest keeps you on top of your latest newsletters while saving you precious time!
That’s why our Premium users get their AI summaries feed, helping them digest their unread newsletters quickly so that they can move on with their day if they have more important priorities. We want AI to be your learning assistant and make your life easier.
Unfortunately, embedding AI into our system costs money through APIs, and Bilig is completely self-funded.
Therefore, our AI features will only be available through the Premium membership, which costs $5.99 per month.
Combined with other benefits you get with the Premium membership, we think this is an affordable price that offers you a lot of benefits.
4-) Track your learning progress: There is a difference between reading and reading with intent. We want to track our progress on different subjects, measure our consistency with reading habits, and gain insights into what we have been reading.
Bilig does this in two different ways.
The first is an analytics dashboard that gives you useful insights into your reading activity, reading time, reading by category, your favourite publishers, and other personalised insights. Some of this will be available to all users, while others will only be available for the Premium users.
The second is a personalised learning path map based on your readings. This section is meant to ‘gamify’ your newsletter reading experience via different achievement and award points and remind you how much progress you’ve made. We think it will give you a whole new perspective on your newsletter reading experience.
Overall, we tried to create a platform that is going to make your life easier, turn your inbox chaos to a pleasant newsletter reading experience, and help you discover interesting and high-quality content.
While we are proud of what we have built so far, we are always open to feedback and suggestions for improvements. Our ultimate goal is to help the reader, you, to navigate the information overload and make newsletters a tool for learning instead of an inbox burden.
If you have any suggestions for us, or if you think we have left out a feature that could be helpful, do not hesitate to get in touch with us. To find out when we launch the platform, you can sign up for the waiting list here and become one of the first people to know when the platform is available.
Free Tier vs Premium Tier
One quick word at the end regarding our premium tier.
As mentioned above, Bilig is built by independent developers who have seen a gap in the newsletter space and wanted to provide a positive experience for learning junkies like us.
Bilig is still free to sign up. You don’t have to pay a dime to start using the platform.
The premium tier is designed to give you more usage limit and cool features, such as AI-powered summaries and personalised insights to make your experience a lot more interesting and fun. Meanwhile, it funds our maintenance and API costs and helps us keep the website going.
We think $5.99 per month, basically the price of one coffee, is an affordable price that gives you access to a whole new world, and we hope you will enjoy what it has to offer for your newsletter reading experience.