Maybe you do not need to give 10 % of your income to a venture-backed Silicon Valley firm. Maybe you do not belief a venture-backed Silicon Valley firm to not ultimately pivot away from newsletters totally and destroy everything you built. Or possibly you simply don’t need your e-newsletter hosted on a service that actively recruits and pays extremists. There are all types of causes you may want to go away Substack, is all I’m saying.
Some writers are leaving Substack for Ghost, which is not an altogether pure transition. That’s why I like to recommend (and personally use) Buttondown. Here’s how one can migrate your subscribers and archive from Substack over to Buttondown.
Buttondown versus Stubstack
Buttondown affords a comparison with Substack, if you need to have a look at its record, however just a few options stand out to me.
The first is pricing. Buttondown is free for up to 100 subscribers, after which it prices $9 a month for up to 1,000, and the worth scales up from there. Substack is free however takes a ten % minimize from any paid subscriptions, which is an enormous deal should you ever need to make a dwelling out of your e-newsletter. Imagine should you develop a subscriber base that brings in $4,000 a month—you may be paying $400 of that to Substack. So even the costliest tiers of Buttondown are going to value lower than that.
The second factor to take into consideration is options. Buttondown helps all types of issues that Substack would not, like autosaving. Buttondown would not acquire consumer knowledge until you deliberately flip these options on. There’s additionally an API and a Zapier integration, however way more vital than that to me is which you can write your newsletters in markdown. (I really like markdown with all of my coronary heart.) Basically Buttondown affords all types of nerdy stuff that Substack would not.
Also: Buttondown is bootstrapped, that means it is not beholden to any buyers. Substack has round $82 million of investor cash, which implies there is a highly effective group of individuals hoping for large development. Call me a jaded veteran of the content material mines—I freely admit that I’m—however such entities not often have the curiosity of journalists and writers at coronary heart over the long run. Buttondown, in the meantime, is run by a single particular person—Justin Duke—who responds to emails himself and publicly reviews how much money he spends running the service.
Finally, and most significantly, Buttondown sends you a enjoyable GIF each time somebody subscribes. That alone is cause to migrate over, so let’s speak about about how you are able to do that.
Export Your Newsletter From Substack
Log into Substack and head to the dashboard in your e-newsletter. Click the Settings hyperlink within the prime bar. Scroll manner down to the underside to discover the Export Your Data part. Click Create New Export.
Courtesy of WIRED Staff
