A Substack alternative is worth moving to when you are paying a percentage of your subscription revenue for a format that cannot hold what you actually sell. Substack takes 10% of your subscription revenue, for as long as your subscribers keep paying. There is no plan you can move to that ends it. What that leaves out is the part that decides this for most people, which is the recommendation network you give up by leaving.
How much does Substack actually take?
Substack states its fee on paid subscriptions as 10% of your subscription revenue. Substack's own cut, and not the whole cost: Stripe charges its card fee on top, plus a further fee on recurring billing, so what reaches you is meaningfully less than 90%. Read 10% as the floor, not the total. The cut also never stops, so it grows with you for as long as you stay.
Verified September 2026 against Substack's help center. Check it before you price anything: this is the number your margin depends on and the one most likely to have moved since.
Why do people actually leave Substack?
Three reasons, and only one of them is the fee. Being honest about which one is yours is what stops you replacing Substack with something that has the same problem.
- The cut never stops. A percentage costs more every time you grow, and unlike a subscription there is no point at which it is paid off. At a thousand paying readers it is a salary line.
- An inbox is not a place. Posts arrive, and what is left is a reverse-chronological archive rather than a course somebody works through or a library organised around what they came to learn. Comment threads and a subscriber chat do exist, and both sit under the writing rather than being a room your members come back to.
- The newsletter was the front door. If the money actually comes from coaching, a cohort or a course, the newsletter is marketing and the thing you sell lives somewhere else anyway. Moving to a different newsletter tool does not touch this.
What are the real alternatives, and what does each change?
They split into three groups, and picking the wrong group is how people end up migrating twice.
- The same shape, smaller cut. Ghost and beehiiv are publications like Substack, priced as a flat monthly subscription rather than a percentage. You keep the format and the arithmetic improves. You give up the recommendation network, and Ghost in particular asks more setup of you.
- The email tool. Kit, MailerLite and ActiveCampaign are built for sending, with automations and segmentation far past what a publication does. They are the right move if the newsletter is a marketing channel for something you sell elsewhere, and the wrong move if the newsletter IS the product.
- The membership platform. This is where Drry sits, along with Patreon and Memberful. The premise is different: readers get a login rather than only an email, and what they are paying for can be a course, a library, a community feed or audio, with broadcasts alongside it rather than instead of it.
When is a flat price actually cheaper?
The crossover is arithmetic, so it is worth doing rather than arguing about. A percentage costs you that share of everything; a flat plan costs the same whether you have ten paying readers or ten thousand.
On Drry the free plan runs to 100 members at $0 with no card and 0% of what your members pay, so below that size there is no crossover to find: a percentage of anything is more than nothing. Above it, Creator is $29 a month flat, which a 10% cut reaches at about $290 a month of subscription revenue. Past that the gap widens every month, because one number moves and the other does not.
Both sides of that comparison carry Stripe's ordinary processing fee, so it cancels out and is not what decides this.
What do you give up by leaving?
The recommendation network, and it is a real loss rather than a talking point. Substack writers recommend each other's publications to their own readers, at a scale nothing else here matches: Kit and beehiiv run recommendation networks of their own, and no membership platform has anything of the kind. If most of your subscribers arrived that way, leaving means replacing a channel as well as a tool.
Which is the argument for not treating this as a migration at all. Keep the public writing where it is found, and put the paid part somewhere it can be more than a post. See what Substack costs in detail for the pricing side, and Drry against Substack for the feature-by-feature version.
Questions coaches ask
What is the best Substack alternative?
There is no single best one, because the alternatives split by what you are actually replacing. If you want the same publication with a smaller cut, Ghost and beehiiv are the closest shape. If you want to keep the writing and add a place readers can log into, a membership platform like Drry is the better fit. If the newsletter was only ever the front door to coaching or a course, replacing Substack with another newsletter tool solves the smallest part of the problem.
How much does Substack take?
Substack's fee on paid subscriptions is 10% of your subscription revenue. Substack's own cut, and not the whole cost: Stripe charges its card fee on top, plus a further fee on recurring billing, so what reaches you is meaningfully less than 90%. Read 10% as the floor, not the total. The cut also never stops, so it grows with you for as long as you stay. Verified September 2026 against Substack's help center.
Do I lose my subscribers if I leave Substack?
No, and this is the part Substack genuinely deserves credit for. You export the subscriber list, and the paid relationship runs through a Stripe account you connect and own, so the money already goes straight to you rather than through Substack's own arrangement. What you lose by leaving is the recommendation network, which for many writers is the real cost of the move and has nothing to do with the list.
Is there a Substack alternative with no percentage fee?
Yes, several. Ghost charges a flat monthly price and takes no cut. Drry is free to 100 members with no card, takes 0% of what your members pay you, and the money lands in your own Stripe account, so the only deduction is Stripe's ordinary processing fee. The trade in both cases is that you give up Substack's recommendation network, which is the thing actually growing the list for a lot of people.
Should I move if my newsletter is free?
Usually not, and this is the most common mistake. A free newsletter costs nothing on Substack at any list size, so there is no fee to escape and no financial argument for moving. The reason to move a free newsletter is that you are about to charge for something the format cannot deliver: a course people work through, a library they come back to, or a room they talk in.
Can I keep Substack and run a paid community elsewhere?
Yes, and for a lot of writers it is the right answer rather than a compromise. Substack keeps doing the public writing and the discovery it is best at, and the paid part lives somewhere built to hold it. What is worth avoiding is paying a percentage on the paid half when a flat price covers it, which is the whole arithmetic below.