If your plan is to run a newsletter as a hobby, Substack is perfect—it’s free, easy to set up, and makes sending out emails and building a subscriber base fairly straightforward. The problem comes if you want to make a living publishing your newsletter, at which point Substack can quickly become expensive. That’s because, instead of charging a monthly fee, Substack takes a 10 percent cut of all revenue.
Flawless as their reputation may be, the economics of using Substack are hard to justify over the long term. Say you manage to get 500 people to pay $10 a month for your newsletter—that’s a real accomplishment. It also means your newsletter is pulling in $5,000 a month, of which Substack will take $500. Annually you’ll be paying Substack $6,000, and it only gets more expensive with the more success you have. You might think this is fair, you might not. Either way, sticking with Substack when other options may be more cost-effective at that point is leaving money on the table.
It would be hard to leave Substack, granted. They are a very good, normal company—one that does not at all enable extremism (wink.) Everything Substack does is justified, and good, and pure, and the company certainly wouldn’t send a mob of transphobes into the mentions of a freelance service journalist. Being associated with Substack isn’t bad for your brand, in any way.
With that in mind, here are some more affordable alternatives that are worth checking out, what they cost, and a few links to newsletter publishers who migrated from Substack and discussed their experiences.
Ghost
Ghost is open source and run by a nonprofit. You could, in theory, install Ghost on your own server, though most people opt to pay Ghost instead, including several former Substack publishers. Ghost offers an official guide for migrating and even a free concierge service that will handle the migration for you.
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How does the pricing stack up? Here’s a breakdown:
The Starter plan starts at $9 a month for up to 500 subscribers, which works out to $108 annually. That's a discount over Substack if you're pulling in more than $1,080 a year.The Creator plan starts at $25 a month for up to 1,000 subscribers, which works out to $300 a year, which is a discount over Substack if you're pulling in more than $3,000 a year. This plan also offers custom themes, integrations with other software, and two users.Plans scale up from there. At 10,000 subscribers, for example, the Creator plan costs $99 a month, which works out to $1,188 annually, which is a discount over Substack if you're pulling in more than $11,880 a year.For 200,000 subscribers the Creator plan costs $1,065 a month, which works out to $12,780 annually. You would have to be pulling in $127,800 a year before that works out as a discount over Substack.
Prices scale regardless of whether a subscriber is paying you or getting the free edition, which means Ghost Pro probably isn't the best deal for truly massive audiences. Because Ghost is open source, however, you can migrate the entire newsletter to your own server after it's established.
A few high-profile newsletters have moved from Substack to Ghost, and those who outlined their reasons include Forever Wars by Spencer Ackerman, Welcome to Hell World by Luke O'Neil, and The Reading by Yanyi. The Atlantic also runs its various newsletters on Ghost, including the former Substack newsletter Galaxy Brain by Charlie Warzel.
Buttondown
Buttondown is run by one person, Justin Duke, who responds to emails with questions basically instantly. It is bootstrapped, meaning there are no investors pushing for growth. We've talked about how to migrate your newsletter from Substack to Buttondown before, or you can email Duke and he'll do the migration for you (although we’d recommend giving the one man behind the one-man show a break and doing it yourself, it’s not difficult).
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Here's how the pricing works out:
The Free plan works for up to 100 subscribers, but you can't use this plan if you want to charge for subscriptions.The Basic plan costs $9 a month, or $108 a year, and works for up to 1000 subscribers. That's a discount over Substack if you're pulling in more than $1080 annually.The Standard plan supports up to 5000 subscribers. It costs $29 a month or $348 a year, which is a discount over Substack if you're pulling in more than $3480 annually. This plan also allows you to remove all Buttondown branding and adds support for integrations with other software.The Professional plan supports up to 10,000 subscribers and costs $79 a month, which works out to $948 a year. That's a discount over Substack if you're making over $9480 annually. You can use one account to run multiple newsletters at this level.Pricing past this point is worked out with Duke directly over email.
Newsletters that migrated from Substack to Buttondown include The Hypothesis by Annalee Newitz. (Full disclosure, I also operate a free newsletter run on Buttondown.)
Beehiiv
Beehiiv offers one of the most generous free versions of any application on this list, supporting up to 2,500 subscribers, and offers a straightforward migration tool. There's also a referral program, meaning you can give discounts to readers who convince their friends to sign up. Here's the pricing breakdown:
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The Free plan supports up to 2,500 subscribers. You cannot offer paid subscriptions with this plan.The Grow plan supports up to 10,000 subscribers and costs $42 a month, which works out to $504 annually. If you're pulling in over $5040 annually, this is a discount over Substack.The Scale plan supports up to 100,000 subscribers and costs $84 a month, which is $1,008 annually. If you're pulling in over $10,080 annually, this is a discount over Substack.
Newsletters that migrated from Substack to Beehiiv include Young Money by Jack Raines and The Publish Press by Colin and Samir.
Revue
Revue is owned by Twitter, and setting up the service adds a big “newsletter” section to your Twitter profile. Now, it’s natural for any writer paying attention to be skeptical of Twitter, the company, but if you have a large audience on the social network, you might benefit from this integration. Revue offers a tutorial for migrating from other platforms, including Substack, but does not offer any kind of specialized service or tool for the job.
Revue charges a 5 percent fee on all premium subscriptions, which will scale as your newsletter grows. That’s disappointing compared to services with static pricing, granted, but Revue is still worth mentioning here because it’s literally half the price of Substack.
Consider the Alternatives
Substack has raised over $82 million in venture capital, which is a way of saying that some very rich people expect to see a massive amount of growth from this newsletter company. If you work in media, or have paid attention to the past 20 years of online publishing history, you might be skeptical that such a situation will benefit you financially in the long term.
To Substack’s credit, right now it’s relatively easy to migrate your newsletter off their platform and onto other ones. Hopefully it stays that way, but if you’re at all skeptical that might change, I recommend migrating sooner rather than later.