Quick answer: if you want a single customer success newsletter to start with, subscribe to The CS Café. It's weekly, free, and read by 4,300+ CS and revenue pros, covering the systems that prevent churn, grow NRR, and earn exec trust, from a CSM's daily work up to how leaders run the org. Pair it with ChurnZero's Fighting Churn for benchmarked retention data, and add Gain Grow Retain or Gainsight Pulse Weekly for extra leadership and community depth. The rest of this list covers the newsletters worth adding once those are in your inbox.
Most "best CS newsletter" lists online are stuffed with vendor blogs that email you a product update once a month and call it a newsletter. This one is not. Every entry below actually lands in inboxes on a real cadence, is written for practitioners rather than for a marketing funnel, and earns the subscribe. We tell you who writes it, how often it publishes, what it costs, and who gets the most out of it.
A note on how customer success reading has changed. The function now owns net retention, expansion, and product adoption, and the newsletters have split along the same lines. Some cover the data-and-platform side, some cover leadership and team-building, and some cover the day-to-day tactics an individual CSM runs. We've grouped the list roughly that way so you can pick the two or three that match your current role instead of subscribing to all ten and reading none.
1. The CS Café
Written by: Hakan Ozturk (15+ years in CS)
Best for: CS and revenue leaders, and the CSMs who want to operate like them
Cadence: Weekly · Free, with a paid tier · Subscribe
The CS Café is a Substack newsletter read by 4,300+ CS and revenue professionals. Its focus is systems rather than soundbites: preventing churn, growing NRR, owning renewals and expansion, and earning executive trust. Recent editions tackle what CS leaders actually wrestle with, like what a CSM should say the moment an account is flagged at-risk, why spreading attention evenly across accounts quietly costs you revenue, and how to turn a CS team into a commercial growth engine without burning it out. It also publishes free CAC, LTV, and NRR calculators, plus a career thread that connects to live hiring data, since the same team runs TopCSJobs. Full disclosure, this is our newsletter, which is why we can be precise about it. It speaks to individual CSMs and to the leaders running the org, and it stays practical and no-fluff rather than theoretical.
Start with: "The CS Revenue Revolution: Stop Being Just Support" for the frameworks behind 110%+ NRR, or the at-risk account outreach framework if churn is your immediate fire.
2. Fighting Churn (ChurnZero)
Written by: The ChurnZero team
Best for: CSMs and CS Ops focused on retention metrics and benchmarks
Cadence: Weekly · Free · Subscribe
Fighting Churn pairs weekly retention tips with something most newsletters can't offer: real benchmark data. ChurnZero publishes the annual Customer Revenue Leadership Study, one of the larger public datasets on how CS teams are structured, staffed, and compensated, and the newsletter surfaces those numbers alongside tactical retention content. If your work touches renewals, health scoring, or anything tied to NRR, the benchmarking alone justifies the subscribe.
Start with: Any edition that references the latest Customer Revenue Leadership Study data.
3. Gain Grow Retain
Written by: Jay Nathan and Jeff Breunsbach
Best for: CS leaders building and scaling teams
Cadence: Weekly · Free · Subscribe
Gain Grow Retain sits on the leadership-and-strategy side of the field. It comes paired with an open community of B2B SaaS CS leaders, and the writing focuses on the problems that show up once you own a team: hiring, structure, operating at scale, and defending CS budget internally. If you are moving from CSM into leadership, this is the reading that meets you where you are headed.
Start with: A recent edition on CS team structure or headcount planning.
4. Gainsight Pulse Weekly
Written by: Gainsight
Best for: CS pros tracking industry shifts and the CS-product interface
Cadence: Weekly · Free with signup · Subscribe
Curated from the largest CS community, Pulse Weekly is the closest thing the field has to an industry digest. It leans toward product adoption, health scoring, and where CS meets product, and it is a reliable way to keep a pulse on what the platform side of the profession is discussing. It carries a vendor point of view, which is worth knowing going in, but the research-led editions are genuinely useful rather than product marketing dressed as editorial.
Start with: A Pulse keynote recap or an edition on AI in health scoring.
5. ELG Insider (Crossbeam)
Written by: The Crossbeam team
Best for: CS pros whose retention and expansion run through partnerships
Cadence: Daily · Free · Subscribe
ELG Insider covers ecosystem-led growth, which is a longer way of saying expansion and retention that happen through partners rather than in isolation. It is the only daily on this list, so subscribe only if you want a short read every morning. For CS pros at companies with a real partner motion, it fills a gap the other newsletters barely touch.
Start with: An edition on partner-influenced retention or co-selling into your base.
6. The Customer Success Pro Newsletter
Written by: Anika Zubair
Best for: CSMs who want to grow into commercial, revenue-owning CS
Cadence: Weekly · Free · Subscribe
Anika Zubair writes short, direct editions aimed at CSMs who want to move from friendly-and-helpful into commercial ownership of their book. The recurring theme is turning CS from a cost center into a growth function, with practical steps rather than theory. It reads like advice from a manager who wants you promoted.
Start with: An edition on moving from a friendly CS relationship to a commercial one.
7. The Customer Success League
Written by: The Customer Success League team
Best for: CSMs newer to the field building foundational habits
Cadence: Regular · Free · Subscribe
The Customer Success League delivers steady insights and stories aimed at CSMs earlier in their careers. The content skews toward fundamentals and community, which makes it a good complement to the more data-heavy newsletters higher on this list.
Start with: Any recent edition on onboarding or first-90-days playbooks.
8. Vitally Success Network
Written by: Vitally
Best for: CS teams managing large books through scaled and digital CS
Cadence: Regular · Free with signup · Subscribe
Vitally's content, part of its Success Network, publishes forward-looking pieces on scaled customer success, CS-qualified leads, and the role of AI in the daily work. Like the other vendor-backed entries, read it knowing the source, but the scaled-CS material is genuinely ahead of the curve and worth it if you manage hundreds or thousands of accounts.
Start with: A piece on running digital CS for a high-volume book.
9. Totango Blog & Digest
Written by: Totango
Best for: CS operators focused on customer-led growth and health scoring
Cadence: Regular · Free · Subscribe
Totango's content covers customer-led growth, health scoring, and CS operations from a platform that has been in the category a long time. It is closer to a blog digest than a written newsletter, so it lands here rather than higher, but the operations material is solid.
Start with: An article on building a customer health score that your team will actually use.
10. SaaStr (CS content)
Written by: Jason Lemkin and the SaaStr team
Best for: CS pros who want CS in the context of the whole SaaS business
Cadence: Frequent · Free · Subscribe
SaaStr is not a CS newsletter, it is a SaaS newsletter that covers CS well. If you want to understand how investors and founders think about retention, expansion, and CS headcount, it gives you the altitude the role-specific newsletters do not. Subscribe for context, not for daily tactics.
Start with: Any SaaStr piece on net revenue retention or CS as a growth lever.
How we curated this list
Three questions decided what made it. First, does it actually publish on a real cadence, or is it a product newsletter that emails you when there's something to sell? Second, is it written for practitioners, or is it marketing wearing an editorial coat? Third, do CS people actually recommend it to each other? We don't accept payment for placement. We review and update this page quarterly, and we remove newsletters that go quiet.
Which ones should you actually subscribe to?
You do not need all ten. Pick two or three that match where you are right now.
If you are an individual CSM building your craft, start with The CS Café and The Customer Success Pro. If retention metrics are your job, add Fighting Churn for the benchmarks. If you lead a team, Gain Grow Retain and Gainsight Pulse Weekly are the two to read. If your CS runs through partners, ELG Insider earns the daily slot. And if you want to understand where CS sits in the wider SaaS picture, SaaStr gives you that altitude.
Newsletters we considered but left off
We left off several names that show up on other lists. Some are vendor product-update emails rather than newsletters. Others were genuinely good but have gone quiet, and we don't recommend subscribing to a newsletter that hasn't published in months. If any of them resume a real cadence, we'll add them back. If we've missed one that belongs here, tell us and we'll take a look.
Frequently asked questions
What is the best customer success newsletter in 2026?+
For most CS professionals, The CS Café is the best single newsletter to start with. It is practitioner-written, weekly, free, and aimed at both CSMs and CS/revenue leaders, and read by 4,300+ CS pros. If you want benchmarked retention data alongside tactics, pair it with ChurnZero's Fighting Churn. CS leaders often read both plus a leadership-focused newsletter like Gain Grow Retain.
Are customer success newsletters free?+
Most of the top CS newsletters are free, including The CS Café, Fighting Churn, Gain Grow Retain, and ELG Insider. Gainsight's content is free with an email signup. Paid CS content tends to be community memberships or certification courses rather than newsletter subscriptions.
Which newsletters do customer success leaders read?+
CS leaders and Chief Customer Officers lean toward leadership-focused reading: Gain Grow Retain for team-building, Gainsight Pulse Weekly for industry shifts, and ELG Insider for expansion through partners. Individual CSMs lean toward The CS Café and Fighting Churn for tactical playbooks.
How often do CS newsletters publish?+
Cadence varies. The CS Café, Fighting Churn, Gain Grow Retain, and Gainsight Pulse Weekly publish weekly. ELG Insider publishes daily. Most CS pros settle on two or three weeklies plus at most one daily.
How is a customer success newsletter different from a CS blog?+
A newsletter arrives in your inbox on a set cadence and is written to be read start to finish. A blog is a library you visit when you have a question. Many CS platforms run both, and the strongest publishers use the newsletter to point you toward the deeper blog content.
Related CS resources
Looking for a CS role while you read?
TopCSJobs lists 570+ Customer Success roles from companies like Gong, Notion, Intercom, Vanta, and Anthropic, updated daily from real ATS feeds. Browse open CS roles or create a free candidate profile.
Want the tactics in your own inbox? Subscribe to The CS Café. Want help applied to your own search rather than general reading? I also offer written CS career coaching.
