Yep. I saved hundreds or even thousands of dollars a month just from switching from Substack to self-hosted Ghost. I pay a roughly flat $85/month now (~$75 for mailsending, $10 for hosting), vs. 10% of all my subscription income.
Former Substack creators say they’re earning more on new platforms that offer larger shares of subscription revenue
digiday.comApr 11, 2025 at 2:47 PM
Molly White
Yep. I saved hundreds or even thousands of dollars a month just from switching from Substack to self-hosted Ghost. I pay a roughly flat $85/month now (~$75 for mailsending, $10 for hosting), vs. 10% of all my subscription income. Here’s some napkin math for how expensive Substack is compared to its competitors:
Has Substack’s subscription model really “maxed out?”
Scott Carney and Taylor Lorenz posted on Substack about downward subscriber trends they’re seeing. Carney pins it on subscription fatigue and feeling like “The only way to grow is to pillage the paid subscribers from other creators.” Lorenz questions Substack’s direction, saying “more and more like this app is becoming another social media feed.” When we recently wrote about writers who are leaving Substack, they mentioned control, pricing, and the social feature creep among their reasons for choosing competitors like Ghost and Behiiv. [Link: Writers are fleeing the Substack Tax | https://www.theverge.com/tech/927294/substack-tax-ghost-beehiiv | The Verge]
Former Substack creators say they’re earning more on new platforms that offer larger shares of subscription revenue
Former Substack writers who exited the platform in early 2024 are making more money on Beehiiv and Ghost thanks to their fixed pricing models.
Migrating from Substack to self-hosted Ghost: the details
I migrated Citation Needed from Substack to self-hosted Ghost. Here is exactly how I did that.
Migrating from Substack to self-hosted Ghost: the details
I migrated Citation Needed from Substack to self-hosted Ghost. Here is exactly how I did that.
timtrautmann.com/ghoststandard
Ghost is lightweight headless server that enables Ghost self hosters to bridge to standard.site with ease..
How I’ve Attracted The First 500 Paid Users For My SaaS That Costs $5/mo
You Don’t Have To Get Covered on Large Blogs, Why Churn Rate is Surprisingly Low, Spend a Lot of Time At User Forum, etc..
Ghost: The best open source blog & newsletter platform
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A Full-Network Relay for $34 a Month | bryan newbold
This is an update to a Summer 2024 blog post. At the time, atproto relays required a cache of the full network on local disk to validate data structures. With the Sync v1.1 updates, relays don't need all that disk I/O. What impact does that have on hosting setup and operating costs? Turns out the d...
Subscriptions start working for the middle
"Six-figure Substack incomes and subscriber numbers sure sound great, but they're not the only ends to the means."
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Bart Piotrowski (@barthalion@treehouse.systems)
Meanwhile DigitalOcean couldn’t afford $50 a month for GNOME and Flathub VMs and cancelled their sponsorship last month.
Help fund our lil indie operation! Larger legacy communities on Discord can now pay $30/month to unlock live bridging at scale for the purpose of either safe-keeping or incrementally transitioning their community to Roomy and the atmosphere. should we add a $5/month good-vibes-only supporter plan?
Roomy Pro
blog.roomy.spaceCan you really leave Substack? Substack was built on the promise that creators could leave whenever they wanted, taking their audience & payments with them. Then they built an app, started processing payments through Apple & Google Pay, & now if you leave, you lose everything.
