In case your plan is to run a publication as a pastime, 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 dwelling publishing your publication, at which level Substack can rapidly grow to be costly. That’s as a result of, as an alternative of charging a month-to-month charge, Substack takes a ten % reduce of all income.
Flawless as their status could also be, the economics of utilizing Substack are exhausting to justify over the long run. Say you handle to get 500 folks to pay $10 a month to your publication—that’s an actual accomplishment. It additionally means your publication 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 costlier with the extra success you will have. You may assume that is truthful, you may not. Both manner, sticking with Substack when different choices could also be cheaper at that time is leaving cash on the desk.
It will be exhausting to depart Substack, granted. They’re an excellent, regular firm—one which does in no way allow extremism (wink.) Every part 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 manner.
With that in thoughts, listed below are some extra reasonably priced alternate options which might be value trying out, what they price, and some hyperlinks to publication publishers who migrated from Substack and mentioned their experiences.
Ghost
Courtesy of Ghost
Ghost is open source and run by a nonprofit. You may, in concept, set up Ghost by yourself server, although most individuals decide to pay Ghost as an alternative, together with several former Substack publishers. Ghost gives an official guide for migrating and even a free concierge service that may deal with the migration for you.
