If your plan is to run a e-newsletter as a passion, Substack is ideal—it’s free, simple to arrange, and makes sending out emails and constructing a subscriber base pretty easy. The downside comes if you wish to make a dwelling publishing your e-newsletter, at which level Substack can rapidly change into costly. That’s as a result of, as an alternative of charging a month-to-month price, Substack takes a ten % reduce of all income.
Flawless as their repute could also be, the economics of utilizing Substack are exhausting to justify over the long run. Say you handle to get 500 individuals to pay $10 a month to 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 may assume that is truthful, you won’t. Either manner, sticking with Substack when different choices could also be more cost effective at that time is leaving cash on the desk.
It can be exhausting to go away Substack, granted. They are an excellent, regular firm—one which does by no means 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 dangerous to your model, in any manner.
With that in thoughts, listed here are some extra reasonably priced options which are value trying out, what they price, 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 might, in principle, set up Ghost by yourself server, although most individuals choose to pay Ghost as an alternative, 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.
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