Let me start by saying that I appreciate what Substack is trying to do for journalism. The promise of the hosted publishing platform is that anyone can start a subscription-based publication—primarily as a newsletter—without having to worry about building a website, setting up a membership system, and fussing with design. Just put good words in, and if your audience is devoted enough, money will come out. For a growing number of writers, it’s a welcome reprieve from feeding the algorithms of Google, Facebook, and Twitter—and a chance to make some decent money along the way. But one thing I’ve realized in nearly five years of publishing my own independent newsletters is that doing things the hard way has its own rewards, from keeping more of the money to maintaining a stronger sense of independence. As more writers start building up their own newsletter businesses, I suspect a lot of them will discover this for themselves. Starting from scratch If we’re being honest, I probably would have jumped on board with Substack myself if it had been available when I started writing a newsletter about cord-cutting in 2016. Nearly every newsletter service back then was focused on email marketing instead of editorial writing, and they all charged high prices if your mailing list grew too large. As I started to outgrow Mailchimp’s 2,000-subscriber limit for free users, self-hosting seemed like the only option that didn’t cost upward of $30 per month. (Mailchimp did have its own writer-friendly service called Tinyletter , but it, too, had a 5,000-subscriber limit
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Writers who crave independence should skip Substack—and do this instead