In case your plan is to run a e-newsletter as a passion, Substack is ideal—it’s free, simple to arrange, and makes sending out emails and constructing a subscriber base pretty easy. The issue comes if you wish to make a residing publishing your e-newsletter, at which level Substack can shortly develop into costly. That’s as a result of, as an alternative of charging a month-to-month price, Substack takes a ten % reduce of all income.
Flawless as their popularity could also be, the economics of utilizing Substack are exhausting to justify over the long run. Say you handle to get 500 individuals to pay $10 a month to your e-newsletter—that’s an actual accomplishment. It additionally means your e-newsletter is pulling in $5,000 a month, of which Substack will take $500. Yearly you’ll be paying Substack $6,000, and it solely will get dearer with the extra success you have got. You would possibly suppose that is honest, you won’t. Both means, sticking with Substack when different choices could also be more cost effective at that time is leaving cash on the desk.
It might be exhausting to depart Substack, granted. They’re an excellent, regular firm—one which does in no way allow extremism (wink.) All the things Substack does is justified, and good, and pure, and the corporate actually wouldn’t ship a mob of transphobes into the mentions of a contract service journalist. Being related to Substack isn’t dangerous to your model, in any means.
With that in thoughts, listed here are some extra inexpensive alternate options which can be value testing, what they price, and some hyperlinks to e-newsletter publishers who migrated from Substack and mentioned their experiences.
Ghost
Courtesy of Ghost
Ghost is open supply and run by a nonprofit. You can, in idea, set up Ghost by yourself server, although most individuals decide to pay Ghost as an alternative, together with a number of former Substack publishers. Ghost affords an official information for migrating and even a free concierge service that can deal with the migration for you.
