I hate to be "that guy" but I'm genuinely having a hard time reading this page.
* thin white text on light grey buttons
* thin light grey text on almost matching light grey background
(anti-spam message below email input)
* small thin light grey text on white background
* on highlight, dark grey text on... burnt orange?!
I'm in the target market for this program -- a developer whose design skills are pretty weak -- but the landing page is a big turn-off. Even I can recognize when fonts are needlessly small and low-contrast.
EDIT: Pull up your favorite color contrast analyzer and run this site through it. Using AccessColor, the results are ~4% failure and ~75% warning for WCAG 1.0 standards.
I think there is a difference between "looks good aesthetically" and "readable" and sometimes making it more readable doesn't overlap with pure artistic choices, so sometimes it's the best designers that fall into this trap.
I am not sure which part you are referring to, but here i see mostly black text on white background.
but that is the landing page, the email itself is indeed hard to read (all the problems you mentioned).. I waited several seconds after opening the email because I thought the CSS haven't finished rendering.
I see black text on white background as well, but since multiple people are mentioning this problem, I'm suspecting that the landing page is being A/B tested as we speak.
UPDATE: Either the maintainers are responding to feedback or, as speculated downthread, some A/B testing is going on. If the latter is the case, pick B, for the love of all that is holy!
EDIT: Pull up your favorite color contrast analyzer and run this site through it. Using AccessColor, the results are ~4% failure and ~75% warning for WCAG 1.0 standards.