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.
a. does not cannibalize sales transactions.
b. does not have design incentives to be delibrately
bad/frustrating/incomplete
c. does not allow the creation of bad business metrics
like "Look how many free users it has!"
d. *does* create a virtuous cycle where there is revenue
for support and maintenance proportional to its use.
1. 10,000 free users and 1000 paid users means supporting 11,000 users on the revenue from 1000 (and that's assuming an optimistic 9% conversion rate and an optimistic 1000 users). With the current pricing that's less than 50k a year before expenses.
2. The revenue model in #\1 suggests a significant probability that the business will be underfunded. Underfunded businesses tend toward ceasing operations. I mean if the business gets to 1000 paid accounts a year from now at a steady rate, that's only 25k in the first year.
3. Where I am going is that the as a business proposition, if it is worth investing the time in building and managing a website on PageRocket, then it is probably worth 50€ a month and with 50€ a month per paid account, there is money to run a business and incentives to make the product worth 50€ a month or 100 or 200.
Of course, if the goal is passive income, then that's a different model.
4. There was an interview with Jeff Atwood (I think on Hanselminutes but maybe Software Engineering Daily) where he described the three things a landing page has to do. The two I remember are it has to tell people 'what it is' and 'why the person should care'. A lot of goes in to those will be subject to interpretation by the visitor. "Oh a box to type in my email address" leads to a lot of quick assumptions that it is probably better not to have people make.