Substack does not have a pricing page in the usual sense, because it does not charge you to publish. You can write to two hundred people or two hundred thousand and the monthly bill is the same: nothing. That is a genuinely good deal for a newsletter that is not charging anybody, and it is why so much of the internet writes on it.
The moment you turn on paid subscriptions, the arrangement changes shape. Substack takes 10% of your subscription revenue, and it keeps taking it for as long as you stay. The number is easy to find and easy to say out loud. What it actually costs you is a different question, and it has two parts most comparisons skip.
Does Substack take more than 10%?
Substack's own help center is clear that Stripe's fees apply in addition to Substack's cut. So a $10 monthly subscription does not arrive as $9. Card processing takes its usual percentage plus a fixed 30 cents, recurring billing carries a further charge, and only then do you see what is left.
The fixed 30 cents is the part that quietly punishes low prices. On a $10 subscription it is 3% on its own; on a $5 subscription it is 6%. Two writers can both be "paying 10% to Substack" and be losing quite different shares of their revenue, purely because of where they set the price.
What does Substack's cut cost as you grow?
The useful way to read a revenue share is not as a rate but as a monthly invoice, because that is what it is. At a $10 monthly subscription, Substack's 10% alone comes to:
- 100 paying subscribers. $1,000 a month in, $100 a month to Substack. Annoying, and cheaper than most software.
- 500 paying subscribers. $5,000 a month in, $500 a month to Substack. That is now the largest line item in most one-person publishing businesses.
- 2,000 paying subscribers. $20,000 a month in, $2,000 a month to Substack, or $24,000 a year, for hosting that costs the same to serve as it did at 100.
Nothing about the service changes across those three rows. The cost does, by a factor of twenty, because it is indexed to your success rather than to what you are consuming. That is the whole argument, and it is not a complaint about 10% being greedy. It is that a percentage is the wrong shape for a cost you intend to outgrow.
When is a flat fee cheaper than Substack?
Against a flat monthly fee the arithmetic is a single division, and the answer surprises people. A $29 flat fee equals Substack's 10% at about $290 of monthly subscription revenue: roughly 29 subscribers at $10, or 12 at $25.
Below that line the percentage is genuinely cheaper than our paid plan, with one qualifier that matters more than the arithmetic: our free plan carries 100 members at 0% and no card, so a small paid list that fits inside it costs nothing here against 10% there. It is a list larger than 100, free readers included, that puts you on the paid plan and makes this comparison the real one. Above the line, the two lines diverge and never reconverge, because one of them is flat and the other is not. At 500 subscribers the percentage costs about 17 times the flat fee. This is the same structural point we make about platform fees as a tax on growth, and Substack is the cleanest example of it because the rate never steps down.
What do you get for Substack's 10%?
It is worth being fair about this, because the fee is not nothing in return. Substack gives you discovery: the network, the recommendations between publications, the app, and a readership already in the habit of subscribing. For a writer starting from no audience, that distribution is real and hard to buy elsewhere.
The question is whether you are still buying it. Discovery is most valuable when nobody knows you exist, and least valuable once your subscribers arrive because they already follow you. Many writers keep paying a growth-indexed fee for an introduction they stopped needing years ago, which is the point at which the 10% has quietly become rent.
Can you leave Substack and take your subscribers?
Mostly yes, and what does not come with you is the discovery that the 10% was paying for. Substack lets you export your subscriber list, paying status included, and paid subscriptions can be migrated through Stripe. So the list is yours in the way that matters, and we think that is worth saying plainly rather than implying you are trapped.
The part that does not move is the archive. Unless you pointed a custom domain at your publication from the beginning, every link a reader has shared or bookmarked lives at a substack.com address, and those are the links search engines have indexed. That is the real switching cost, and it is the one to fix early rather than at the point of leaving. If you care about owning that side too, we wrote about owning your audience rather than renting it and about why an export you cannot actually use is not ownership.
Is there a cheaper alternative to Substack?
We should be direct about the conflict: Drry is a paid platform and we take 0% of what you charge, so we have an obvious interest in you reading a revenue share as expensive. Check the arithmetic above against your own numbers rather than taking our framing, and note the honest case against us: below roughly $290 a month of subscription revenue, Substack's 10% costs you less than our paid plan does. The qualifier is your list size, because our free plan carries 100 members at 0% and no card, so a small paid list that fits inside it costs nothing here. If your readership is larger than that, staying on Substack below the crossover is the cheaper call and you should take it.
If you want the feature-by-feature version of that comparison rather than the fee arithmetic, see Drry vs Substack, which sets the two products side by side on everything that is not price.
The figures in the box above come from Substack's own help center and carry the date we checked them. Pricing moves, so if you are reading this much later, verify against the source before making a decision on it.
Questions coaches ask
How much does Substack cost?
Nothing to start, and 10% of your subscription revenue once you charge. There is no monthly plan and no list-size limit: publishing to 200 people or 200,000 costs the same, which is zero. Substack is paid out of what your readers pay you instead, and that arrangement has no end date. Stripe's card fee and its recurring-billing fee are charged on top of the 10%, so the total leaving your revenue is meaningfully more than a tenth.
Is Substack's 10% the whole cost?
No, and this is the number most comparisons get wrong. Substack's help center states that Stripe's fees apply in addition to Substack's cut. Card processing is the familiar 2.9% plus 30 cents, and recurring billing carries a further charge, so on a $10 monthly subscription you are giving up the 10%, the card percentage, the fixed 30 cents and the recurring fee. Read 10% as the floor.
When does a flat monthly fee beat Substack's 10%?
Earlier than most writers expect, because the comparison is a percentage against a fixed number. At $29 a month flat, the crossover against a 10% cut arrives at roughly $290 of monthly subscription revenue: about 29 subscribers at $10, or 12 at $25. Below that the percentage is cheaper than our paid plan, though a list that fits inside our free plan's 100 members pays nothing here and 10% there. Above it the percentage keeps climbing while the flat fee does not, and the gap widens every month you grow.
Does Substack take a cut of anything other than subscriptions?
The 10% is on paid subscription revenue, which is Substack's core model. The thing to watch is not a second fee but the direction of the first one: it is charged as a share of what you earn, so every price rise and every new subscriber increases it. A platform fee that is a percentage is not a cost you pay once and then outgrow, it is a cost that grows with the success you are trying to build.
Can I move a paid Substack list somewhere else?
You can export your subscriber list, including which subscribers are paying, and Substack supports migrating paid subscriptions to another platform through Stripe. The practical friction is not the export, it is the relationship: your archive lives at a substack.com address unless you pointed a custom domain at it from the start, so the links readers have shared and bookmarked for years are the part that does not move cleanly.