AI News moves to smol.ai: new Resend + Vercel signup and search

AI News has moved its newsletter and signup infrastructure to news.smol.ai, the team announced on April 25, 2025. The service is leaving Buttondown behind and running on a custom Resend + Vercel + SmolTalk stack, with signup and deliverability improvements and a new fast, faceted search front end.

What changed

For a little over a year AI News operated in MVP mode on Buttondown, which the announcement calls "an excellent email service by Justin Duke." The team said it ran far longer on Buttondown than expected, and noted that its signup page was once featured on Lex Fridman thanks to a "@levelsio shoutout."

The migration swaps Buttondown for a custom stack built on Resend and Vercel, with SmolTalk coming soon. The new public home is https://news.smol.ai/ where the announcement says visitors will "immediately see the win of fast, faceted search." Email delivery will come from the address "news@smol.ai" going forward.

The team also asked early readers to help with deliverability, writing that they have "less email authority on that one so if you can pick us out of spam hell and drop us in the blessed IMPORTANT folder we'd be very grateful." The post closed with the line "More updates are coming! We are almost done paying down tech debt."

Background and context

AI News describes itself as an MVP service that scans AI-focused Discords, Twitters and Reddits and summarizes what people are talking about, positioning the product as a way to keep up "without the fatigue." Signing up on the new site opts users into the full product when the team launches it.

The announcement frames the move as an effort to improve signup, deliverability and the web experience. It also teases SmolTalk as a forthcoming component and flags an upcoming presentation: the team said it will talk more about the migration at the next AI Engineer conference in San Francisco in June.

The post leans on a short history: Buttondown hosted the MVP and enabled the project to reach visibility (including the Lex Fridman mention), but the team wanted more control over signup, deliverability and site features, hence the custom stack.

Why it matters

The change signals a common next step for small, rapidly iterating newsletters that begin on hosted email platforms. Moving to Resend and Vercel gives the team more control over deliverability and site performance, while the addition of fast, faceted search indicates a shift from a simple email product toward a searchable web archive. For subscribers who depend on timely aggregation of community chatter, those improvements can lower friction when finding past summaries or filtering topics.

The migration also surfaces an operational tradeoff: losing some email reputation when switching providers, acknowledged directly in the request for reader help to avoid spam folders. That candid ask highlights how dependency on provider-delivered reputation can affect open rates and early-user experience.

What to watch

Look for the SmolTalk rollout and further notes from the team at the AI Engineer conference in San Francisco in June; those announcements will show whether the project remains primarily a newsletter or pivots toward a broader searchable product. Also monitor emails from "news@smol.ai" in readers' inboxes to see whether the deliverability issues the team warned about are resolved quickly.

—-

Key facts from the announcement: the migration was posted April 25, 2025; the previous platform was Buttondown by Justin Duke; the new stack is Resend + Vercel + SmolTalk; the public site is https://news.smol.ai/; contact emails will come from "news@smol.ai"; the team will speak at the AI Engineer conference in San Francisco in June; the signup page had earlier been featured on Lex Fridman after a "@levelsio shoutout."