If your plan If you want to publish a newsletter as a hobby, Substack is perfect: it’s free, easy to set up, and makes sending emails and building a subscriber base fairly straightforward. The problem arises if you want to make a living publishing your newsletter, in which case Substack can quickly become expensive. That’s because instead of charging a monthly fee, Substack takes a 10 percent cut of all revenue.
As impeccable as its reputation is, the profitability of using Substack is hard to justify in the long run. Let’s say you get 500 people to pay $10 a month for your newsletter: that’s a real accomplishment. It also means your newsletter is generating $5000 a month, of which Substack keeps $500. Annually, you’ll pay Substack $6000, and the cost only gets more expensive as you become more successful. You might think this is fair, you might not. Either way, sticking with Substack when other options might be more profitable at the time is leaving money on the table.
It would be hard to leave Substack, of course. It’s a very good, normal company that does… you are welcome allowing extremism (wink.) Everything Substack does is justified, good, and pure, and the company wouldn’t send a horde of transphobes to a freelance journalist’s mentions. Being associated with Substack isn’t bad for your brand, by any means.
With that in mind, here are some more affordable alternatives worth checking out, how much they cost, and some links to newsletter publishers who migrated from Substack and discussed their experiences.
Ghost
Courtesy of Ghost
Ghost is Open source and managed by a non-profit organization.In theory, you could install Ghost on your own server, although most people choose to pay for Ghost, including several former Substack editors. Ghost offers An official guide to migration and even a Free concierge service which will take care of the migration for you.