Substack lets you bootstrap your own creator-led media company for free. So what makes some newsletters start to look for Substack alternatives? Well, the problems start when the money comes in.
In this article, we’ll explore the problem with Substack pricing and other limitations that make you second-guess if it’s the right platform for your business. So, if you’re already feeling the drain or even if you’ve just recently started investing your time and energy in Substack, keep reading. The following points may save you a lot of grief down the line or even supercharge your growth.
Substack Pricing — How Does It Work?
Substack lets you start publishing for free right away. This is a huge incentive for anyone with no tech knowledge because you don’t need to pay anyone to set up your publishing platform. You simply register on Substack and start writing your first post. The only fee you’d have to pay would be a one-time fee of $50 if you’d like to connect a custom domain to your Substack.
You can choose to offer your posts for free or to put them behind a paywall and charge subscribers. Once you do, the platform will take a 10% commission, and little fees pop up here and there. These expenses don’t add up to anything at first — what’s 10% of $5,000 dollars, right? But once your newsletter starts to grow and thrive, the strain on your income begins to show.
Here’s what happens when your subscriber base grows. Let’s say you earn $50000 annually, Substack’s share will be $5000, while Stripe’s 2.9% will strip you down another $1450 plus the transaction fees. This 10% sums up to a significant amount in the long run, an amount you could invest in other growth channels to get more subscribers.
So getting back to our initial question, is Substack the right platform for you? If you are deciding on monetizing your growing newsletter and subscriber base, you might want to check out Substack alternatives.
Why Publishers Are Looking for Substack Alternatives
The reason some newsletter writers and publishers are looking for Substack alternatives is not limited to the Substack pricing structure. Substack comes with some limitations that can affect reach, customization, and even ranking. You have to consider these when your Substack newsletter starts to grow:
Not Possible To Have a Custom Design
Another setback of using Substack is that it does not offer a lot of flexibility when it comes to customizing the design of newsletters. You can choose from a few different templates and add your own logo but not much more than that. For example, you can’t customize your newsletter’s layout or its overall design.
With this limitation, it’s difficult to develop a distinct brand identity. Brand identity is built through consistent and cohesive visual elements such as a specific color scheme, typography, and imagery. If you can’t make your newsletter look the way you want, it won’t fully convey your brand or message. Moreover, you may feel your newsletter is not as professional or polished as it could be.
Also, since you are using the same template as many other Substack authors, you can’t stand out from other newsletters within your niche.
The lack of design flexibility can make it challenging to create a visually engaging and memorable experience for your readers. This can affect the overall appeal and perceived value of the newsletter, making it less likely that readers will subscribe or continue to engage with the content.
When it comes to design limitations, there are also two more things you need to consider: embedding videos and custom marketing.
Only YouTube Videos Can Be Embedded
You can embed YouTube videos in your posts as easily as pasting a link. But you can’t do so with videos hosted on any other video platform like Rumble, Odysee, Gyazo, or BitChute.
If you host videos on a platform other than YouTube, it’s going to be a tedious task to embed them on Substack. Substack does not recognize the embedded URL as a video link if it’s not from YouTube — so, no video.
One workaround is to take a screenshot of the video and use it as a placeholder and then link that screenshot to the video hosted somewhere else. But this would take some time and take the user out of your website.
So if you’re going to upload lots of videos in your posts, stick with YouTube, or you’ll have trouble with Substack.
No Custom Marketing Offer
You have a profitable marketing strategy in mind: You’d like to offer 50% off for three months or $1 for the first month to your potential subscribers. Good plan, right?
The thing is, with Substack, you can’t implement these alluring offers.
Generally, Substack’s internal marketing features are limited. Your best bet would be to share some of your best content for free. When all is said and done, marketing offers are managed by Substack. You don’t have a say in it.
Substack Articles Do not Rank Well for SEO
There’s a great chance you’re never going to rank on the first page of Google with Substack since you can’t use any SEO tools. There’s not much you can do to improve the SEO in Substack other than getting a custom domain — since custom domains are more likely to rank than subdomains.
The other problem is that the “domain authority” (DA) score is relatively lower than most Substack alternatives like Medium. A website’s content is ranked according to this metric. The lower the DA, the lower you rank in the search results.
Realistically speaking, the audience reach of your newsletter is limited to your subscribers. Going beyond this list via SEO is going to take a very long time. Furthermore, keep in mind that Substack only features top posts, which means that when starting out, you’re almost invisible to the world.
Overall, other than linking it to Google Search Console, Substack does not offer you any way to optimize for SEO — not even using 3rd-party solutions.
Indeed, the lack of 3rd-party integration is one of the major limitations of Substack.
No 3rd-Party Integration
Substack alternatives use many 3rd-party plugins for accomplishing specific tasks. For example, the Yoast SEO plugin for WordPress is popular for helping website owners optimize their website for organic traffic. Exactly how effective these 3rd party SEO tools on WordPress are, however, is an entirely different matter. Ask most SEO specialists, and they will tell you they offer very limited tools for on-page optimization at best.
With Substack, even these 3rd-party plugins are out of the question. Let’s forget about SEO, you won’t even be able to use tools like Zapier to automate common workflows. That means more work and less flexibility on every front.
Not being able to add 3rd-party plugins to your website makes it almost impossible to add custom features or improve your website in any way.
The Only Way To Make Money Is Getting Subscribers
Substack is optimized for running a newsletter. That’s the only way you can make money on this platform. You can’t, for example, offer courses, ebooks, or any type of product.
The only other way to make money on Substack is to include affiliate, sponsored, or ad links in your newsletters. There’s no built-in ad network to help you with this; you simply add the links to your newsletter to recommend other products and services and hope for the best. No ad optimization, no nothing. At least you get to keep all the money — if you make any with this method — since there is no help offered.
With this in mind, the main method of monetizing is just to get more paid subscribers. That’s unfortunate. You may start getting traffic to your website after the initial blackout, but you can’t do much to monetize it if they don’t subscribe.
It’s up to You To Grow Your Audience
Substack does not have many built-in tools or features to help you actively grow your subscriber base. This can be a significant challenge if you are just starting out or do not already have an audience.
You might have put a lot of hard work into writing about what you love, but without a rather big list of subscribers, you can’t build a sustainable income from Substack. That’s why you have to rely on other methods to get the initial visibility and attract new subscribers.
Here are some tips for expanding your subscriber base:
- Leverage existing networks. You can promote your Substack newsletter to the existing social media or website followers.
- Guest posting. You can reach out to other websites or publications in your niche and offer to write guest posts, which can include a link to your Substack newsletter in the author bio.
- Paid advertising. You can use paid advertising platforms such as Google Ads to target your ideal newsletter audience.
- Collaborations. You can collaborate with other Substack authors in your niche to cross-promote your newsletters and reach new audiences.
- Offering free content. You can offer some of your best articles for free to encourage people to subscribe.
- Building trust and engagement. You can focus on building trust and engagement with your existing subscribers, doing so by engaging with them through comments or social.
- Write frequently. In order to keep the cash flow coming in, you need to write frequently, maybe multiple times a week. If you only write a couple or so posts per month, it’s unlikely that your subscribers stick around for long.
As it becomes obvious, Substack places a lot of responsibility on you, with few tools to help you. Indeed, in some sense, it even makes your job harder, for example, by offering too broad categories or not including an affiliate program.
Too Broad Categories
Categories help users in finding the information they are looking for. Substack offers a number of broad categories to choose from, but what if you’re writing on a specific topic?
Then you would have a hard time choosing a category. For example, if your niche is gardening, you might not find any fitter category than the “environment” category!
No Available Affiliate Programs
Many Substack alternatives, like Gumroad, let their users make money by sharing their affiliate links with others. This is a simple yet effective and common way to earn more online. But surprisingly, this is not (yet) an option with Substack.
No Email Automation
The ability to send automated emails at the right time to the right audience can be a valuable tool in your marketing arsenal. But email automation is not available in Substack. There’s just a welcome email that is automatically sent to new subscribers.
As a result, you can’t send emails to a reader based on specific actions they took. Moreover, you can’t use time triggers for sending out emails.
These limitations make it impossible to set up an efficient and personalized email marketing strategy.
No A/B Testing
You won’t be able to find out what design or copy changes can lead to higher conversion rates in your subscriptions. Meaning you can’t test the design and placement of your opt-in forms or different pricing for your newsletter.
This is particularly frustrating if your newsletter has grown to a point where you have enough traffic to run A/B tests in a reasonable time period. With Substack’s lack of an A/B testing tool, you can’t. This means you’d be losing growth opportunities.
Substack Alternatives — What to Look for
In conclusion, Substack is a great platform for writers to start a newsletter and make money through subscriptions. However, it does come with some major limitations that should be considered before starting out.
There are so many Substack alternatives offering more features or simply not limiting your growth and revenue. If you want to start a newsletter, grow it professionally, and actually earn a sizable revenue, you can invest in a service like Refact.
The cost of using Substack at 10% of revenue is significant, especially for publishers with a big subscriber list. Since there’s not much you can do to customize the style of your newsletter, you can’t really make a personal brand through design. Adding more features is limited due to the inability to add 3rd-party plugins. Furthermore, poor SEO performance and limited marketing options make it difficult to gain traction, especially at the beginning.
With Refact, you’ll have none of these issues. We provide tailored design and development solutions for content creators. Instead of putting up your content on Substack or it’s alternatives, Refact works with you to create a website and publishing platform that speaks to your unique style and grows as your business does. You’ll pay for a service that will continuously help scale your business without asking for any percentage of your earnings.
Plus, you’ll get to embed any video you want.
Yes, Substack is still a great platform if you are starting out. Once you’ve grown to a point where the 10% commission is eating into your bottom line, though, it may be time to think about a bespoke Substack alternative. Reach out, and let’s see if our tailored web design and development solutions are right for you.