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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 your newsletter’s revenue.
Let’s set aside, for now, how Substack’s reputation might reflect poorly on your publication’s brand. The economics of using Substack are simply hard to justify as your newsletter grows. 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 as your success builds.
You might think this is fair, you might not. Either way, sticking with Substack when other options may be more cost-effective is leaving money on the table. With that in mind, here are some more affordable alternatives that are worth checking out. I break down what these newsletter platforms cost, and I offer a few links to publishers who migrated to these services from Substack and discussed their experiences.
Ghost
Courtesy of 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.
How does the pricing stack up? Here’s a breakdown:
The Starter plan begins 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 user logins.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 205,000 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.
Ghost’s 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.