The Best Substack Alternatives

If your plan is to tally a newsletter arsenic a hobby, Substack is perfect—it’s free, casual to acceptable up, and makes sending retired emails and gathering a subscriber basal reasonably straightforward. The occupation comes if you privation to marque a surviving publishing your newsletter, astatine which constituent Substack tin rapidly go expensive. That’s because, alternatively of charging a monthly fee, Substack takes a 10 percent chopped of each revenue.

Flawless arsenic their estimation whitethorn be, the economics of utilizing Substack are hard to warrant implicit the agelong term. Say you negociate to get 500 radical to wage $10 a period for your newsletter—that’s a existent accomplishment. It besides means your newsletter is pulling successful $5,000 a month, of which Substack volition instrumentality $500. Annually you’ll beryllium paying Substack $6,000, and it lone gets much costly with the much occurrence you have. You mightiness deliberation this is fair, you mightiness not. Either way, sticking with Substack erstwhile different options whitethorn beryllium much cost-effective astatine that constituent is leaving wealth connected the table.

It would beryllium hard to permission Substack, granted. They are a precise good, mean company—one that does not astatine all alteration extremism (wink.) Everything Substack does is justified, and good, and pure, and the institution surely wouldn’t nonstop a mob of transphobes into the mentions of a freelance work journalist. Being associated with Substack isn’t atrocious for your brand, successful immoderate way.

With that successful mind, present are immoderate much affordable alternatives that are worthy checking out, what they cost, and a fewer links to newsletter publishers who migrated from Substack and discussed their experiences.

Ghost

Ghost is open root and tally by a nonprofit. You could, successful theory, instal Ghost connected your ain server, though astir radical opt to wage Ghost instead, including several erstwhile Substack publishers. Ghost offers an authoritative usher for migrating and adjacent a free concierge service that volition grip the migration for you.