In case your plan is to run a publication as a interest, Substack is ideal—it’s free, straightforward 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 publication, at which level Substack can shortly turn into costly. That’s as a result of, as an alternative of charging a month-to-month price, Substack takes a 10 percent cut of your newsletter’s revenue.
Let’s put aside, for now, how Substack’s popularity would possibly reflect poorly in your publication’s model. The economics of utilizing Substack are merely arduous to justify as your publication grows. Say you handle to get 500 folks to pay $10 a month in 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 as your success builds.
You would possibly assume that is honest, you may not. Both means, sticking with Substack when different choices could also be less expensive is leaving cash on the desk. With that in thoughts, listed below are some extra inexpensive alternate options which are value trying out. I break down what these publication platforms price, and I supply a number of hyperlinks to publishers who migrated to those companies from Substack and mentioned their experiences.
Ghost
Courtesy of Ghost
Ghost is open source and run by a nonprofit. You possibly can, in principle, 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 can deal with the migration for you.
How does the pricing stack up? Right here’s a breakdown:
- The Starter plan begins at $9 a month for as much as 500 subscribers, which works out to $108 yearly. That is a reduction over Substack for those who’re pulling in additional than $1,080 a 12 months.
- The Creator plan begins at $25 a month for as much as 1,000 subscribers, which works out to $300 a 12 months, which is a reduction over Substack for those who’re pulling in additional than $3,000 a 12 months. This plan additionally gives customized themes, integrations with different software program, and two person logins.
- Plans scale up from there. At 10,000 subscribers, for instance, the Creator plan prices $99 a month, which works out to $1,188 yearly, which is a reduction over Substack for those who’re pulling in additional than $11,880 a 12 months.
- For 205,000 subscribers, the Creator plan prices $1,065 a month, which works out to $12,780 yearly. You would need to be pulling in $127,800 a 12 months earlier than that works out as a reduction over Substack.
Ghost’s costs scale no matter whether or not a subscriber is paying you or getting the free version, which implies Ghost Professional in all probability is not the perfect deal for actually huge audiences. As a result of Ghost is open supply, nonetheless, you possibly can migrate your complete publication to your individual server after it is established.
