Tearsheet is an Astro theme for a paid newsletter, for analysts, consultants and reporters who want their archive on a site they own instead of on Substack. It takes its manners from the trade journal and the analyst briefing: heavy rules instead of cards, the issue number hung large in the margin, an archive set like a ledger, and one green for the numbers. Its signature is The Cut: a members issue ends its free part with a heavy rule, a count of the words left, a meter and the subscribe form, and everything after the marker is removed while the site is built, so it never reaches the HTML, the feed or the search index.
How it reads
- Piazzolla for the text at 19px and about 68 characters a line, with an italic dek under every headline; Barlow Semi Condensed for numbers, labels and the interface
- The issue number hangs in the margin above 640px, with its ISO week and whether it is free or for members
- The archive is a ledger: one ruled row per issue, grouped by year, each with a bar showing how much of it is free
- One accent, the ledger green, on issue numbers, the current page, the members button and focus. Nothing is rounded and nothing has a shadow
- Dark mode in light-dark() pairs, contrast checked against WCAG AA by a script, and a layout that holds at 360px
What's included
- Home with the latest issue and its meter, issue pages, the archive by year, topic pages, subscribe with a plans table, a thank-you page, start here, sponsor, corrections, about, privacy, terms and 404
- The Cut on every members issue, and <code>pnpm check:cut</code>, which searches the built site for any members text after every build
- Issue numbers and week labels computed from the date; word counts and minutes left computed from the source
- A Buttondown subscribe form in plain HTML, no script
- Pictures in issues resized to a srcset at build time, with plain-Markdown captions. A picture after the cut is cut with the text
- Twenty demo issues across two years, one of them showing every element
- Meta, Open Graph, JSON-LD, sitemap, robots.txt, an RSS feed with the free part only, and an analytics slot (Plausible, GA4)
- Astro 7, Tailwind CSS v4, static output, no client-side framework. Lighthouse and the leak check in CI
- AGENTS.md, a map of the edit points for Claude Code and Cursor
- MIT, with one footer credit line that is easy to remove
Tearsheet Pro adds what moving an existing newsletter over and running it needs: Pagefind search over the free parts, an All/Free/Members filter on the archive, subscribe forms for any provider with an HTML embed, a Substack importer that puts the cut where the paywall was, MDX components for a briefing, related issues, a share card per issue, three colour presets and a second font pairing. See it at tearsheet.ondelva.com.
