My design advice is to get rid of the part that is unpleasant to the maximum extent possible. That's what good design does. It's one of the things Hacker News gets right.

How useful are email updates with static text versus a dashboard that can slice and dice data? Sure some people will want email because that's the way they have always done it. Some people will want email updates because it fits their use case. But everyone won't so it can be opt in.

Or to put it another way, it's not clear that most people will have the problem that email notifications solve or at a finer grain, that the problems that come with email notifications are less painful than the problems that email notification solves.

Riffing a bit...email notifications could be an upsell. The conundrum I encounter with free platforms is investing time in building something when there is not an obvious revenue model.