Not only is Substack right-wing broligarchy garbage, it's way more expensive than Ghost
A lot of us know by now that Substack has a Nazi problem. It not only profits from fascist voices, it actively promotes their work and recruits them. And it's funded by Silicon Valley anti-democracy billionaires like Marc Andreesen — the same type of people who are, right now, raiding the US government to basically cut funding for social services and scientific research, and to steal money for themselves.
Still, a lot of talented writers — including some that I subscribe to — publish on Substack. But others have moved to Ghost, an open source and non-shitty-tech-bro newsletter service. These include Casey Newton's publication Platformer, Molly White's newsletter Citation Needed, and plenty of others. From the beginning, 404 Media decided to publish on Ghost because, as I understand it, Substack sucks.
The website for Cyd, the app I've been working on that helps you claw back your data from Big Tech, is hosted on Ghost too, specifically because I wanted a newsletter.
If you already have a Substack, Ghost has written documentation explaining how to migrate your subscribers (including paid ones) to a new Ghost newsletter. Since both Substack and Ghost use Stripe as a payment processor, your paid subscribers don't have to do anything to continue paying you.
Besides Substack being garbage, it's also extremely expensive
Substack takes a 10% cut of every transaction, while Ghost doesn't take any cut at all. Instead, Ghost charges based on the number of newsletter subscribers you have. (Since Ghost is open source, you can also self-host it if you want and make it even cheaper, though you'll be responsible for keeping your site running and secure.)
Here's a thought experiment to demonstrate my point.
Suppose you have a newsletter with 9,500 free subscribers and 500 paid subscribers who are each paying you $60/year (which is $5/month). This means your subscribers will pay you $30k a year.
- If you host on Substack, Substack will take a $3k cut, and you'll end up with $27k.
- If you host on Ghost, you'll get the whole $30k, but you'll have to pay $99/month for hosting a newsletter with 10,000 subscribers, or $1,188/year.
- With this modest publication, Ghost is $1,812 cheaper.
But now let's say you explode in popularity. You end up getting 200k free subscribers, and 15k paid subscribers. Your subscribers are paying $900k/year to read your content!
- If you host on Substack, Substack will take $90k cut. (That's $90,000 that you're giving this company!) You'll end up with $810k.
- If you host on Ghost, you'll keep the whole $900k and have to pay $1,115/month (for hosting a newsletter with 215k subscribers), which is $13,380/year.
- With this much bigger publication, Ghost is $76,620 cheaper.
There's also a real downside to leaving Substack, but come on
Substack is basically a social media tech platform with a large user base and algorithms for promoting content to its users. If you leave Substack and switch to Ghost, you'll lose all of those social features that might help boost your readership, and by extension your revenue. Your newsletter might not grow as fast.
But on the other hand, it might. For example, I don't think 404 Media is regretting its decision to use Ghost.
But also, fuck Big Tech. Those people can't be trusted.
Now is a great time for writers to extricate themselves from their parasitical relationships with tech platforms and to learn to succeed on their own. We're all quickly learning that we don't need X/Twitter anymore. We also don't need Substack.
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