If your plan is to run a e-newsletter as a pastime, Substack is ideal—it’s free, straightforward to arrange, and makes sending out emails and constructing a subscriber base pretty easy. The downside comes if you wish to make a residing publishing your e-newsletter, at which level Substack can rapidly grow to be costly. That’s as a result of, as a substitute of charging a month-to-month charge, Substack takes a ten p.c lower of all income.
Flawless as their repute could also be, the economics of utilizing Substack are laborious to justify over the long run. Say you handle to get 500 folks to pay $10 a month on 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. Annually you’ll be paying Substack $6,000, and it solely will get costlier with the extra success you’ve. You would possibly assume that is honest, you won’t. Either means, sticking with Substack when different choices could also be more cost effective at that time is leaving cash on the desk.
It can be laborious to go away Substack, granted. They are an excellent, regular firm—one which does under no circumstances allow extremism (wink.) Everything 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 unhealthy on your model, in any means.
With that in thoughts, listed below are some extra inexpensive options which are price testing, what they value, and some hyperlinks to e-newsletter 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 idea, set up Ghost by yourself server, although most individuals choose to pay Ghost as a substitute, together with several former Substack publishers. Ghost affords an official guide for migrating and even a free concierge service that may deal with the migration for you.
