The Brex Benchmark is a monthly snapshot of the top software and AI vendors by dollar spend using Brex. With 30,000+ customers spending billions of dollars on Brex, we have an inside look at the top tools driving modern business. We just explored 2025 book trends among Brex customers. Today, we look at which newsletters are hitting more of our inboxes in 2025. "Startups" are companies with under 250 employees, and "enterprises" are those with 250+ employees.

All eyes are on niche content.

We’ve examined the share of wallet among SaaS and AI tools in The Brex Benchmark, but do we need to start tracking “share of inbox”? Email newsletters are how our customers (startups in particular) consume insights, learn hard-won lessons, and stay ahead — sitting alongside traditional media subscriptions as a way to engage with business news and trends.

The Wall Street Journal remains the go-to source for business news, ranking as the No. 1 paid subscription among Brex customers over the last 5+ years. However, there’s a growing appetite for content from people actually doing the work, not just reporting on it. Lenny’s Newsletter, Stratechery, and The VC Corner are prime examples of loyal audiences forming around topics like B2B fintech, product and startup growth, and LLM playbooks instead of broad “tech” coverage.

More founders and operators are starting newsletters to share real-world lessons, and their peers are subscribing. Our data indicates that 22% of startup news buyers have a paid subscription to a newsletter vs. 13% of non-startup buyers. But that doesn’t mean they’re abandoning traditional media. Startup employees are also 70% more likely to subscribe to newsletters from major media outlets.

Going narrow is the new growth hack.

Top creators are building high-trust communities and loyal audiences around focused, high-value topics. Lenny’s Newsletter cemented itself as the No. 1 business newsletter. Authored by Lenny Rachitsky, a legend in the space for builders and operators, its strong subscriber count nearly matches The Information’s, No. 5 on our media subscription list below, over the last 12 months. Stratechery by Ben Thompson is No. 2 on our list and remains the gold standard for thoughtful, long-form analysis on tech, strategy, and business models.

Other standouts:

• The Pragmatic Engineer (No. 3) by Gergely Orosz is the top technology newsletter on Substack. It’s the go-to newsletter for engineers and tech leaders, sharing honest takes on how big tech really works and what’s shaping the industry.
• Emily Sundberg consistently grows her subscriber base by surfacing cultural alpha with a sharp, engaging voice. Her Feed Me newsletter has held a top 10 spot in 2024 and 2025.
• OnlyCFO at No. 14 anonymously cuts through the corporate finance BS with blunt takes on software metrics, strategy, and ops. With topics like “Are Board Meetings Useless?” and “Is the IPO Process a Scam?”, it’s like getting a finance truth serum injected right into your inbox.

All media is about owning the relationship.

It’s interesting: Ben Thompson uses the “Aggregation Theory” to explain how companies like Google, Apple, Amazon, and Netflix won by owning the user relationship and cutting out the middlemen. The newsletter model looks surprisingly similar. Writers are aggregating demand in niches, bypassing traditional media, and going direct to readers, owning the relationship, distribution, and, of course, the monetization. It’s a reminder that every era of media ends the same way: whoever owns the relationship owns the game.

Newsletter honorable mentions.

We also wanted to shout out some of the fastest-growing business and finance newsletters on our list:

• Sourcery by Molly O’Shea is a sharp, insider’s look at VC deals and startup trends that investors and founders alike swear by. Molly is the queen of startup tea, served with term sheets and trend lines.
• CJ Gustafson’s Mostly Metrics is a masterclass in both financial insight and voice, breaking down complex metrics with clarity and personality across several weekly touchpoints. Definitely the kind of guy you’d grab a Miller Lite with, dissect Stringer Bell’s founder-CEO swagger, and riff on whether fractional CFOs are really a grift.
• CFO Secrets promises to help you be a better CFO with real war stories spanning a global finance career, to-the-point advice in weekly mailbags, and multiple-week deep dives into the business strategy of finance. Come for the insights, stay for the meme game.
• Fintech Is Femme from Nicole Casperson is your essential guide to the financial tech industry's impact on the greater economy, fueled by the inspiring stories of women and diverse leaders.
  

Traditional media is very much alive and well.

The Wall Street Journal made a proactive push toward engaging younger readers in 2024, launching a data-driven campaign to better connect business and news and breaking free of its Wall Street-only appeal. The effort successfully showed how business impacts every part of readers’ daily lives, resulting in a 6.6% YoY increase in subscriptions in early 2025.

CNBC jumped five spots from the previous year, fueled by the January 2025 launch of its premium streaming service, CNBC+. Brex customers are tuning in for a live feed of market-moving news at a time when volatile tariffs and policy shifts are directly impacting tech and startup ecosystems.

• The Information has been a top-3 subscription for Brex customers for the past 7 years until this year, when it dropped to No. 5 with the renewed interest in CNBC and Bloomberg’s digital subscription offerings.
• Both the Financial Times and The Economist climbed five spots in 2025, pointing to Brex customers’ growing appetite for global context rather than just US headlines.

Sumeet Marwaha is the Head of Data at Brex, supporting Brex in understanding how customers spend, adopt tools, and grow their businesses.

All analysis conducted for this report that uses Brex internal customer data is anonymized and aggregated for privacy. To learn more about how we use data in anonymized or aggregated form for these trend reports, email us at privacy@brex.com.