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…
