Why Can’t Writers Seem to Quit Substack?

To Substack or not to Substack seems to be the question for writers of late. Obviously, we’re all doomed to newsletter (she wrote from her third newsletter project). With the layoffs, and the publication closures, and the pivot to AI, the smaller book deals, and the need for a "platform" being top of every writer’s mind, I don’t blame my peers for wondering what comes next for us. But my major question lately is when did “Substack” become the preferred genericization of “newsletter,” and does it really have to remain this way? 

Substack has never been the only newsletter platform (RIP TinyLetter), but by wooing popular writers in the early part of this decade with substantial advances, it gradually became the dominant one for anyone looking to share their thoughts in public. Problematically, that included nazis, anti-vaxxers, transphobes, racists, and misogynists, and not only were many of these people writing newsletters on Substack, their newsletters were soon being promoted by Substack, which over the years came to resemble a social media platform with its own algorithm. (Substack also recently announced a partnership with Polymarket, which two months ago had to walk back allowing "traders to bet on the likelihood of a nuclear detonation around the world.")

This has all led to exoduses now and then by top newsletter writers (I refuse to say Substackers, OK?) in waves over the past few years. Each time, it seems this conversation about the gross things Substack is doing goes like this: 

— Outrage! Incandescent fury!

— Some Big Names leave the platform

— Most Big Names (and small ones) lament they can’t leave the platform for various reasons

— Many, many people remain silent out of weariness or a refusal to engage

Before I get too far ahead of myself here, I should share that I have two newsletters of my own on Substack, and I have personally wished and washed about whether to leave the platform multiple times. 

Deep in the pandemic isolation of 2020, I started my first newsletter on Substack, Gilmore Women, as a group project with my friend/college newspaper co-editor/fellow freelancer Megan Burbank. We’d decided to rewatch the entirety of Gilmore Girls and to write one newsletter on each episode per week detailing what was wrong with the show from a critical, feminist, 2020 lens. The project became fairly successful with a couple thousand subscribers. Six years later, and the project is almost complete. We are moving at a literal snail’s pace through the seventh and final season of the show because writing every week has become impossible, and because the last season is so unbearably hard to watch. Still, the newsletter itself continues to thrive and is now basically providing a kind of passive income when new people find us and pay for access to the back catalog, which is behind a paywall. And they do find us! Mostly, I have to imagine, thanks to Substack’s vast network of people who poke around wanting to read stuff on the app. 

I started my second newsletter, My So-Called Feminist Life, on Substack when I began planning for my book release in early 2024, because I knew I needed a more personal mouthpiece for announcing book events and press (and to chide people into pre-ordering). Using Substack seemed obvious as I already had a bit of a presence there. I’d also just written a book and wanted a spot to be myself, to write essays and book reviews when I felt like it, and all the things I knew there weren't really a lot of places for anymore out in the freelance world. My So-Called Feminist Life has no paywall, but a few people (largely related to me) do pay me through it. 

Here’s the thing: I know Substack is a problematic platform — there’s a reason we started Scratch here on Ghost — but whenever I have considered moving my personal letter somewhere else, it’s felt, well, daunting. Like it would take a lot of time, and effort, and probably money, and for what? I post so irregularly now that I don’t even know if I can or should keep the newsletter around at all. 

When Megan and I together have considered moving Gilmore Women, as we have at multiple points, it has seemed that, because of the number of subscribers we have, we’d have to pay more upfront and deal with potential migration issues. We worry we’d lose the discoverability of our back catalog and don’t know how readers would find us outside of the platform.

All of this is to say that, like many, I’m conflicted. I totally agree with people who leave the platform for moral reasons, and at the same time, I just don’t know if I have the bandwidth to move my own projects away when they’re not a major income stream for me. I also have a lot of questions and feelings about newslettering in general and every writer feeling like they have to be their own personal publisher.

So this week I reached out to some Friends of Scratch, who have wonderful, regular newsletters of their own, and have made the switch away from Substack and survived. 

They answered my many questions about how this is going for them and the impact leaving Substack has had on their work, lives, finances, etc. I spoke with Frankie de la Cretaz, who writes Out of Your League, a queer sports newsletter that they publish on Beehiiv; Minda Honey, who writes Writing For Fakers, a newsletter for writers who have imposter syndrome and are seeking community on Beehiiv; and Leah Reich, who writes Meets Most, a newsletter about technology and design — and how it impacts us humans — which is published on Ghost. 

Their responses via email have been collated and lightly edited. 

How much does it cost you monthly to be on your platform?

Frankie de la Cretaz: The plan I am on at Beehiiv is the Scale plan. For 5,000 or fewer subscribers, which is the tier I am on, it’s $940/year or $89.90/month. However, I took advantage of a discount that was being offered for purchasing an annual subscription and have paid $672 for the first year on the platform (which would break down to $56/month).

Minda Honey: I paid for the entire year upfront [on Beehiiv] during their holiday sale — $413.60 

Leah Reich: I pay an annual fee of $480, or $40 a month, for Ghost. Should my subscriptions increase to over 2500, I’ll have to upgrade to the next level. My newsletter uses my own domain name, which I pay for, and I paid for a theme when I first started Ghost, but I’d like to hire someone to design a proper website for me soon. 

How long were you on Substack, and approximately how many subscribers did you have there?

FC: I was on Substack twice. First from 2019-2021, when I left for Ghost among concerns regarding the platform’s promotion of transphobic content. I returned to Substack in 2023, after struggling to grow my list on Ghost. In September 2025, I left Substack again, this time for Beehiiv. At the time I left Substack, on September 19, 2025, I had 3,664 subscribers. 3,309 were free subscribers, and 355 were paid. 

MH: I think I locked down my Substack name in 2019, but I didn't really start using the account consistently until this past year. I had just under 600 subscribers over there [when I moved in Dec. 2025].

LR: I joined Substack in 2023 after I got laid off from Instagram. That’s where the name of the newsletter came from. “Meets Most” is one of the performance review levels you could receive there — as in “meets most expectations.” When I started the newsletter, I brought over a few hundred subscribers from a defunct newsletter I’d started years before on TinyLetter, but I don’t know how many of those subscribers were ever really active once I started on Substack. 

My intention had been to publish regularly, but I fell off when I started working a contract job later that year. I honestly regret not developing a consistent publishing habit while I was still on Substack because it would have been much easier to grow a subscriber base there, especially in 2023. At the start of 2025 I committed to publishing something every Wednesday, which I’ve kept up since. Then I left for Ghost in February of that year with just over 1000 subscribers. 

If you’re comfortable sharing, roughly how much were you earning on Substack monthly?

FC: Because of the way subscriptions work, where some people make a one-time annual payment and others pay monthly, it’s harder to break down a monthly number. But my income when I left Substack was an annual gross of $13,272 with an annual net of $11,944.80

MH: I went from making less than $20/month in Q1 of 2025, to Q4’s highest month earning $850.

LR: It varied, but it wasn’t a lot. Some months $13, some $50 or a few hundred. I don’t paywall my work, which is maybe silly of me. It’s always free, so anyone who pays does so out of a desire to support (or perhaps pity and guilt).

When did you decide to leave Substack and why? Was there a specific trigger/incident/scandal?

FC: September 2025. I should have left when the initial Substackers Against Nazis exodus happened, but I was afraid to because I had just moved back to the platform and didn’t want to move my list again. But I never felt good about being there. 

I run a newsletter that is incredibly driven by progressive values and my audience is heavily marginalized; I would get emails and messages saying people wouldn’t pay for my work as long as the money went to Substack. I allowed people to Venmo me directly but few did. I felt guilty sharing links to my work in public because I was ashamed that it was hosted on Substack. Eventually, I knew I needed to just bite the bullet and move. As soon as I did so, I immediately felt better. Even at the beginning of the move, when I was rapidly losing subscribers, I felt better about where I was publishing. It felt like a weight had been lifted. 

MH: December 2025. I've always been uneasy with Substack's politics. I also found that the platform was mostly garnering me "Followers" on the platform, and I was rarely receiving subscribers from Substack, much less paying subscribers. [Editor’s note: On Substack you can follow writers to see their “Notes” in the Notes Feed without subscribing to their actual newsletters.] Most of my subscribers and paid subscribers were coming from my own Instagram following and writers who took workshops with me. I also know from using Substack that when all the newsletters are bundled in a single daily email, I don't open that email and I don't read any of those newsletters. I didn't want that happening to my newsletter in my subscribers' inboxes. 

Being part of Substack is like being a store in the mall. Yes, there's more foot traffic, but also your shoppers might get distracted and wander into other stores and end up spending their time and money elsewhere.

LR: February 2025. A few reasons. I’ve written about it in various newsletters, this one in particular. Obviously, a major issue for me was Substack not only platforming fascists, Nazis, and now Andrew Tate, but also pushing and promoting their content. But just as important to me were three other issues: 

1. Substack is a walled garden. Walled gardens aren’t healthy for the internet or for those of us who want to use the internet. They’re fun at first, because they’re cozy and it’s easy to find stuff you like, but ultimately they stifle healthy growth and community. It’s literally a gated community for your content. 
2. Substack is also a gussied up social media platform, ostensibly oriented around longform writing. It may not be based on the social graph, like Instagram or X/Twitter, but it has similar network effects and algorithmic drivers as all of the other social media platforms. The plus side for users is, of course, that you can network and promote and hopefully get visibility and a bigger audience. The downside is everything we already hate about social media, which is harder to see because it’s still the earlier stages of platform growth, before it gets ugly. We keep diving in over and over to the same platforms, built by the same industry, thinking they’ll change, and then once again the same ugly problems crop up.
3. The ethos, and industry, and VC money that built Substack built these other social media platforms that have made us all so miserable. They still have the same values and goals, and those are values and goals that are antithetical to what I care about, which is fostering real human connections, building and maintaining community, existing on a more human scale that you just can’t find when you have millions of people all yelling into the same space. Obviously some really powerful connections still happen on Substack, as it does on other platforms, and I know there are real communities on Substack that foster real creativity. It’s not that it’s impossible to do all of that on Substack, it’s that it’s less and less likely to be a sustainable model. Over the longer term, it’s mostly possible for bigger names, bigger creators, people who have Substack’s support and aren’t just doing everything themselves. 

To be honest, I’d wanted to get off Substack earlier than I did, so when I decided to fully commit to a regular publishing schedule of at least once a week, I knew I had to do it. 

How easy or difficult was the process of leaving? This includes migrating existing subscribers, moving their financial information over, any new backend tech issues you encountered, etc.

FC: Full disclosure, it was a nightmare. But the reason it was a nightmare was fully because of Substack. Their data export is terrible, and they give you almost no data aside from subscribers and the words you’ve written. I lost every single paywall, every lede image. Formatting was a mess. Subscriptions duplicated. There were payment issues. It took about six months for me to stop fielding regular questions or issues from subscribers. Most of the issues I had could have been avoided if Substack’s data export was better, but that’s just another way they keep you dependent on their platform — by withholding your own data and IP from you.

However, part of the reason I chose Beehiiv is for how helpful and supportive they were. They made the move entirely possible. My friend Theo Pavlich, who works in tech, also helped me with a lot of the back end logistics. But I had a connection in Beehiiv’s solutions department who I could email directly, and he would walk me through every issue I was having. The Beehiiv support team responded to ticket inquiries within the hour and often had my issues fixed immediately. They would take the time to tell me how to handle the issues I was having and if it wasn’t something I was able to do on my own, they’d do it for me.

I was also shocked at how much more control I had on the back end of my newsletter on Beehiiv’s platform. Better data, breakdowns, and control over my subscriber lists, Discord integration, etc. I had no idea how many features I was losing out on with Substack until I moved to a different platform.

MH: It was pretty easy. I hit a hiccup and Beehiiv got me an appointment with a tech who helped me troubleshoot it. I thought the Stripe of it all would be a hassle, but it was fine. 

LR: This part is so embarrassing, because I unfortunately have to share that I accidentally came off as a total lunatic to the team at Ghost. If any of them are reading this, please once again accept my deepest apologies.

The tl;dr is that it’s really easy. You sign up, set up your newsletter, buy a custom theme if you want, and then you push a bunch of buttons. It’s all pretty seamless.

The longer story is that when I signed up, the very nice support people at Ghost kept sending me the same link, which was on a page for developers. It detailed a much more technical process, so I kept emailing saying, hey I paid for Pro and it comes with migration support — when will someone help me? They kept saying they were backed up, and here was information on how to do it myself, and it was always the same link. I didn’t realize there was a totally separate step-by-step guide in the non-dev FAQ that made the process incredibly easy and straightforward.

Did you lose subscribers or income in the move? Have you recouped those losses if so? Conversely, have you grown now that Substack isn’t taking 10% of your earnings? 

FC: I initially saw a decent dip in subscribers, but most of those subscribers were bot accounts or low-engagement subscribers that Substack uses to pad numbers. Some people chose to unsubscribe once I left the Substack platform because they liked reading newsletters in-app. About three months after leaving, I was transparent with the public about my loss of subscribers and income and ran a sale on annual subscriptions. Through that, I recouped all my lost subscribers and earned many new paid ones. Since then, I have grown exponentially.

MH: I did lose some subscribers. Mostly unpaid. Mainly people who'd signed up and were receiving my newsletter bundled with 20 other Substack newsletters. [After moving], suddenly it's popping up in their inboxes directly, and they realize they aren't actually interested in being subscribed. Outside of that, my typical newsletter attrition has remained steady. Because I had such a big December, and most of those earnings were annual memberships, my monthly earnings have leveled off and are just the handful of folks I have that pay by the month instead of the year. 

For me, it made sense to make the move to Beehiiv from Substack if I planned to earn more than $4,000 from my newsletter for the year. So I decided to take the leap. Beehiiv also offers podcasts, webinars, products, and Link-in-Bio pages at no additional costs, which makes it feel like I can grow without getting nickel-and-dimed every step of the way. But I do worry I may become dependent on Beehiiv for everything, and then the price might wildly increase!

LR: I didn’t lose subscribers in the move, although like any newsletter I’ve lost subscribers along the way while gaining new ones. I haven’t done the math, but I think at first I actually made less by leaving Substack. Substack only takes a cut if you earn money from paid subscribers. Otherwise it’s free. Ghost is not free. I have to pay to use Ghost regardless of whether or not people buy subscriptions. I didn’t tell my readers this when I moved, because moving was my decision, and because I moved for ethical reasons. I am almost certain I took a loss for the first few months. 

How are your new subscribers finding you now that you’re off of Substack? 

FC: I am being found organically! I promote my newsletter through Bluesky and Instagram, the only social media platforms I’m on. But many of my referrals come from direct links to my work, or from being interviewed about my writing in mainstream publications or on podcasts. Beehiiv also has a referral network that has led to nearly 100 new subscribers.

MH: Through Instagram and my website.

LR: I wish I knew! I have some web analytics, so I can sort of see where people come from, but a lot of the time I don’t know. Sometimes Bluesky, although I find Bluesky is not great for generating traffic unless a bigger account with a more active following reshares a post. To be honest, this has been one of the biggest downsides and frustrations for me about leaving Substack. It’s lonely having a non-Substack newsletter. 

People are no longer in the older habit of visiting blogs to read and comment, or keeping track via an RSS feed or whatever. We don’t go visit our friends online but instead go to a central location (usually a walled garden platform) where content is delivered to us in an easier, more manageable form. Plus, because it’s a newsletter, a lot of people read it in their email. They don’t even come to the newsletter. Many people didn’t even know there were comments! It’s quiet and it feels like so much more work. So growth is hard. It kind of sucks, especially if, like me, you do not excel at self-promotion. But there is a plus side: Anyone who reads your newsletter does so with a lot more intention. It’s not there inside the app being hand delivered to them. They have to willingly open and then read an email, which is honestly a big deal in 2026. 

I have a small subscriber base but a pretty high average open rate, which means I have readers who really want to hear what I have to say and engage with it. That feels better than shouting into the void or getting a lot of drive-by commentary from people who don’t get it.

Broadly, how does being on a non-Substack platform impact your writing life? 

FC: I think it’s improved. I actually really like not being on the Notes feed that took over my Substack experience. It put me in an echo chamber and impacted what I chose to write about and why. I found myself tailoring my writing to the Substack algorithm on Notes rather than to my subscribers themselves or to the work I wanted to be doing.

MH: I don't think it does. I guess I don't really benefit as much when other accounts tag me on Substack when I'm published in their newsletter. 

LR: It hasn’t really impacted my writing life at all. Well, no, I take that back. I don’t know if it’s causal, but I do think writing away from a social media-like environment has improved my writing and my life, and thus my writing life. Substack felt more like a popularity contest at times, or like another version of “who will command the most attention by inserting themselves into the conversation and spotlight.” 

On Ghost it’s just me and my lil newsletter, and without some of the distractions it’s served the same purpose as any regular practice: It’s been a workshop for my ideas, for my writing, for my work in a larger sense, whether book writing or consulting.

Did you have any hesitations about leaving Substack? Or warnings against it?

FC: I was worried that leaving would lose me discoverability and that I would take a financial hit. But I realize now that is the narrative Substack wants you to believe so that you remain dependent on and stuck with their platform. I should have left sooner. I wish I had left sooner.

MH: Yes. I worried I was falling into a blackhole to be forgotten forever, but apparently that was dramatic. 

LR: No hesitations or warnings. Just that it would be harder to grow, but I was willing to accept that. I write about all of this stuff — about how we have to be willing to step back from these big, buzzy spaces, be ok with smaller numbers, and get back to cultivating smaller and more human-scaled spaces. What would it have looked like if I wrote that but didn’t walk the walk?

How much of your income does your newsletter make up? 

FC: My newsletter is approximately two-thirds of my income.

MH: My newsletter currently makes up very little of my income and most of what it brings in at this point is reinvested back into the newsletter itself. 

LR: Very little. It’s a few hundred a month at best. I’d love for it to make up more, so please do feel free to pay for my writing!

How often do you publish, and how much time do you spend on newsletter production each week? What else are you working on? What are your other income streams?

FC: I try to ensure I publish at least once a week. Usually I publish 2–3 times per week but I am not on a strict schedule. I try to remember that people are paying to support my work as it comes, not to hold me to an unrealistic or unsustainable schedule. My newsletter is a mix of reported content, essays, interviews, and link roundups, in addition to maintaining a monthly book club and an active subscriber Discord server. As a result, I probably spend around 30 hours a week on my newsletter. I also have freelance assignments that I juggle, as well.

MH: Every Monday. About 2–3 hours per week. I'm working on my next book, I'm freelancing for various outlets, writing coaching and leading workshops, and I'm working a few days a week at a cafe/art gallery/boutique/community space. My life has largely been subsidized by my savings since I was laid off last July.

LR: I publish once a week, on Wednesdays. I’m also working on a book proposal, do freelance editing, and am working on branching out into contract work for smaller (tech) companies. After years of working in tech I was able to self-fund a sabbatical of sorts, but I can’t do that forever so I definitely need to up my income streams this year. 

Do you think the newsletter model is a sustainable one long-term? 

FC: Not really, no, unless real ways to bundle subscriptions becomes feasible. There are only so many independent writers and creators that a single person can afford to subscribe to. This model also means that people with large followings stand to make much more money but the overwhelming majority of people with newsletters won’t. When there are centralized publications who hire and commission writers, it’s a more equitable financial ecosystem. Ideally, there will be bundling opportunities in the future that allow writers who share an audience to create collectives, or allow bigger name writers to use their platform to boost the audience of smaller writers.

MH: I suppose it depends on what you need your newsletter to do for you. I draw income from my newsletter subscribers but even unpaid subscribers buy workshops or pay for coaching. I got serious about my newsletter because I wanted to force myself to write each week. It began as a experimental space for me and grew into a writing community that I cultivate for others.

LR: No. It’s absurd to ask everyone to pay $50 or $80 per year in perpetuity for all the different newsletters they want to support, especially in an ever-diminishing job market. And even if people are willing to pay that, in order to make it lucrative you need to have a substantial subscriber base who will pay. You have to paywall everything, and it’s harder to do that when you’re small, trying to grow your audience, or don’t have the confidence that your writing is worth X dollars per month. Smaller newsletters will have to stay in it for the love of the game. 

Lots of newsletters use affiliate links and sponsors (a topic about which I have many opinions). But even if we all wanted to get in on that game, it’s not a path available to all. Many newsletters aren’t about product recommendations, and not all creators are out to sell you something. For better or worse — often for worse, the ad takeovers on many blogs was/is intolerable for the user experience — blogs had/have ads. Personally, I would love more spaces online in which someone is not trying to sell me something, but we all know that historically we still end up paying in those spaces, usually with our data, our content, etc. 

Another problem with the newsletter model is that journalism needs better and bigger infrastructure to thrive. I’m not a journalist, but it’s still important to me, because we desperately need good journalism. But you can’t do that if it’s just a bunch of plucky writers without any kind of institutional support or larger distribution model. 

Ultimately, it comes back again to the platform issue. People don’t want to have to stay on top of a million emails, even if those emails are newsletters from writers they like. They don’t want to have to go to different websites every time they read. 

Do you plan to stay on your platform? 

FC: Yes, I’ve been incredibly happy with Beehiiv.

MH: Right now, yes. I like the new products they've been rolling out. 

LR: Yes, Ghost is wonderful. It’s mostly good for my needs, even if it is harder to attract a larger, and this is especially important for me, non-tech audience. The only other platform that could maybe help me do that is Substack, and it would be awfully weird of me to go back. So I need to figure out how to grow without the support of a platform. 

Is there anything you miss about Substack, and what services or community-building elements do you think platforms like Ghost, Beehiiv, Patreon, and ButtonDown should strongly consider implementing ASAP?

FC: Honestly, no. I get the community-building aspects I need from Beehiiv and don’t miss the Substack Notes feed at all. Many of the subscribers I got through the Substack app may have padded my free subscriber count, but they were not “quality” subscribers. What I mean by that is they were less likely to convert to a paid subscription, less likely to open my newsletter at all, and less likely to engage via commenting, responding, or sharing the work. Since leaving Substack, my free-to-paid subscriber number has gone up from just under 10% to 12%. People who are subscribing are doing so because they want to actively read and engage with and support my work.

MH: All of my friends are over there! But no, I don't need Beehiiv attempting to be a social media platform.

LR: One thing I don’t love about Ghost, and that I think might be a structural issue – as in how the system was built, so I don’t know if there’s an easy technical solution — is that you can’t respond to comments from the dashboard. If you want to respond to someone’s comment, you need to be logged in to your site like anyone else who has a subscription/membership. 

You didn’t used to be able to do anything comment-related from [Ghost’s] admin dashboard, and they have made some changes there, so maybe more functionality is on the way! 

I sometimes wish it felt a little more like a hub or a one-stop-shop, at least as a content creator. It is nice on Substack to be able to manage your posts/newsletter and respond to comments. Everything is interconnected. I would love for these platforms to find new ways to facilitate a more cohesive experience without giving in to the more negative network effects like virality.

Any advice, pro or against, for writers who are considering leaving Substack?

FC: Leave Substack yesterday. If you can’t muster the backbone to do it for moral and ethical reasons, then do it for purely financial ones—why would you want to give 10% of your earnings to a tech platform, especially one that does such heinous things with that money?

MH: Substack is like AOL (a gated online community) and Beehiiv is like Internet Explorer — access to the entire World Wide Web!!

LR: Do it, but be prepared for it to feel lonely.

Users have gotten used to a more centralized model, a one-stop shop where you can catch up on whatever content you’re consuming, whether newsletters or videos or tweets. It’s great at first, and then it’s not so great, and we fall for it every time. Big tech companies control so much of the infrastructure of our lives, and they maximize that by relying on the fact that we will gravitate toward whatever is easiest and fastest, whatever provides the “better” experience, even if that better but immediate experience is worse for us as a society in the long run.

Let’s figure out how to boost each other and foster smaller, more sustainable communities at a more reasonable scale. We need to think about online life the way we think about our physical, in-person communities, so let’s reimagine our digital spaces the way we try to reimagine our civic spaces.

This essay was edited by Rahawa Haile.

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Scratch is a weekly newsletter about how your favorite writers are surviving (or not). We are a four-person collective publishing essays, interviews with other writers, and topical inquiries into the publishing and media industries today. If you like what we’re doing here and want to support us, a paid subscription is the best way to do so.