In case your plan is to run a publication as a pastime, Substack is ideal—it’s free, straightforward to arrange, and makes sending out emails and constructing a subscriber base pretty simple. The issue comes if you wish to make a residing publishing your publication, at which level Substack can shortly grow to be costly. That’s as a result of, as an alternative of charging a month-to-month charge, Substack takes a ten p.c lower of all income.
Flawless as their popularity 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 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 may have. You would possibly suppose that is truthful, you may not. Both method, sticking with Substack when different choices could also be more cost effective at that time is leaving cash on the desk.
It will be laborious to go away Substack, granted. They’re an excellent, regular firm—one which does by no means allow extremism (wink.) Every little thing 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 method.
With that in thoughts, listed below are some extra inexpensive alternate options which can be value testing, what they value, 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 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 presents an official guide for migrating and even a free concierge service that can deal with the migration for you.