Patreon vs Substack
A membership against a publication.
Patreon and Substack are both free to start and both fund themselves the same way, by taking a share of what your supporters pay for as long as they keep paying. That is where the similarity stops. Patreon is a membership with tiers, posts and perks; Substack is a publication with the best reading experience in the category and a network that genuinely finds subscribers. The choice is about shape rather than price. Disclosure: we make Drry, a flat-price alternative to both, and we get to it below.
The honest recommendation.
Pick Patreon
Pick Patreon if the offer is access and perks rather than writing: tiers, member-only posts, early releases, and people who came for you rather than for a newsletter. Its discovery is weaker, but the membership shape fits creators whose work is not mainly text.
Pick Substack
Pick Substack if you write, and especially if you want help being found. The reader experience is the best here, the recommendation network is a real growth channel rather than a feature, and the publication format asks far less setup of you than a tier structure does.
Where Drry fits.
Patreon takes a percentage of your memberships and Substack takes a percentage of your paid subscriptions, for as long as your supporters keep paying, so on both the platform bill grows precisely as you succeed and there is no plan you can move to that ends it. Drry charges a flat price, takes 0% of what your members pay, and the money lands in a Stripe account you own.
- Keep 100% of member payments. Only Stripe's standard processing fee applies, we take nothing on top.
- Payments run through your own Stripe account, so your customers and subscriptions belong to you, not the platform. No payment lock-in.
- Funnels built in: fast landing pages on your domain with views, joins, and revenue attributed per page. Standalone funnel tools charge $49 to $97 a month for less.
- A genuinely free tier: 100 members, 5 GB storage, unlimited courses, and the community feed, with no card required.
- Courses, a community feed, members, and payments in one branded space you own.
- Step-by-step guides built in and free on every plan, with no cap: rich-text steps with images and native video, a what-you-need list members tick off, on a tab you can rename to Recipes, Workouts, or Protocols. Flip any one of them public and it becomes a shareable, search-indexable how-to page with a QR code, a lead-capture form, and your call to action, so the same guide serves your members and brings you new ones.
- Your own address like grace.drry.com out of the box, with custom domain and site white label on paid tiers, and white-label email from your own domain on Growth.
- Member analytics on the $29 Creator plan: who is showing up, what is landing, and who is quietly drifting away. The kind of insight other platforms save for their priciest plans.
- Get paid for 1:1s and packages: send a client a one-time or installment link with an agreement they sign before paying. Built in, free on every plan, and no platform fee. Other platforms make you bolt on a separate contract tool, and most never reach 0%.
- Let clients book you without a second subscription: publish your session types and share one link, free on every plan (2 session types on free, unlimited from Creator). A booked time becomes a real session on the same calendar your classes run on, so the invite, the reminders, and cancellation come with it, and anything already on that calendar closes its own slot. From Creator the call can happen in a room of your own instead of on someone else's link, and either way the person who booked becomes a contact you can follow up, by hand or automatically. Standalone schedulers hand you a time and an email address and stop there.
- Bring your list with you, and take it back out whenever you want. Import your contacts from a CSV in the browser (we check every address before it lands, so a bad list never touches your sending reputation), and export the whole audience on any plan including free. Most platforms make leaving quietly difficult; we would rather you stay because it is working.
- Audio your members can actually take with them: the library is free on every plan, with a player that does speed, a sleep timer, resume, and lock-screen controls, and Growth adds a private, revocable podcast feed per member so the same library plays in Apple Podcasts or Overcast, offline and listed in no directory. Most platforms cap audio or send you to a second paid product to do this, and the ones that do have feeds cannot tell you who actually listened. We can, because the web player stays primary and the feed is additive.
- Email your whole community, built in on every plan, even free (700 sends a month on free, 60,000 on Creator, 500,000 on Growth), no add-on and no second tool to wire up. Creator adds email automations: welcome journeys, lead-magnet delivery, and win-backs that run on their own.
- Give a journey a goal, and it stops chasing people who already did the thing. Set the goal to paying, or active in the community, or holds a tag, and every enrolled person is re-checked against it each time the journey comes back to them, instead of marching to the end of a script written weeks ago. It also applies to people who are already partway through: the goal is read fresh every time, not frozen into their journey the day they entered, so one you add today reaches them at their next step rather than only catching people who start after you.
- Members can message each other and you, 1:1 or in a group you or an admin starts, on every plan including free. Images and files, reactions, unsend your own message, blocking. Your side is a real inbox rather than a notification list: saved replies you fire with a slash, and beside a one-to-one thread that person's lifetime revenue, tags, join date, and your private notes. On Growth you can switch on optional AI screening that flags a worrying message into your moderation queue for you to judge.
- Lifetime revenue per member, free on every plan, so you can see what each person is actually worth: every membership charge, payment link, and product sale they have settled adds up on their row in your members list, on their profile, beside their name in your inbox, and in your CSV export. Not a report you go and run, and not a feature saved for a top tier: just a number next to their name, so you know who to look after.
- Drip, prerequisites, and graded quizzes, free on every plan and enforced on the SERVER rather than hidden in the interface. Release a lesson a set number of days after someone joins, on a fixed date, or a set number of days after they finish what comes before it; gate whole modules and whole courses the same way; set the pass mark on a quiz yourself. A locked lesson's video, transcript, attachments, and body are refused by the routes that serve them, so there is no URL to guess your way past. Most platforms put course release controls on a paid tier, if they have them at all.
- Captions and transcripts written for you, free on every plan including the free one, and never metered. Publish a lesson video, an audio lesson or an audio track and we transcribe it: captions on the video player's CC button, and for audio a panel members can search where every line is a tap to that second, next to chapters you named yourself. Correct the machine's wording once in the editor and we never overwrite it. Where the bigger suites have this, it tends to arrive on an upper plan or against a monthly allowance of AI credits you top up.
- Sell more than one membership level out of ONE community, on Growth: a Basic, a Pro and a VIP, with per-course, per-room, per-session and per-collection control over who each is for. Everything you leave open stays open to everyone. A lower tier still sees what it does not have, marked with what unlocks it, so your own library does the upselling; a genuinely private room can be hidden outright instead. Your email audiences split the same way, so "VIP and up" is a rule rather than a list you maintain by hand. The usual alternative is running a second community, with its own members, its own posts and its own bill.
Patreon vs Substack, common questions
Does Patreon or Substack take more?
Close enough that it turns on your case rather than the headline. Patreon's platform share depends on when your page was created, and Substack applies one rate to paid subscriptions, with card processing on top in both cases. The fact boxes above carry the current terms; compare them against your own revenue rather than against each other.
Can I run a paid newsletter on Patreon?
You can, and people do, but it is a membership tool doing a newsletter's job: delivery, the archive and the reading experience are all better on Substack. If the writing is the product, that gap compounds with every send, which is the thing to weigh rather than the headline rate.
Do I own my list on either?
On Substack, more fully than people assume: you export the subscriber list, and the paid relationship runs through a Stripe account you connect and own. On Patreon you can export your patron list too, but the billing relationship is Patreon's, so leaving means asking supporters to subscribe again.
Can I move between them?
The list exports either way; the paid relationship is the hard part. Patreon owns the billing relationship, so supporters re-subscribe when you leave. Substack's runs through a Stripe account you already own, which makes leaving it far less disruptive. Either way, tell people before the move rather than after it.
Try Drry free. Bring your people.
Courses and community together in your own branded space, and you keep 100% of what your members pay you.