AWeber, Beehiiv, ConvertKit, Ghost, Mailchimp, or Substack: Which Is The Right ESP For Your Indie Newsletter?

If you’re launching your own indie newsletter, you’re going to need a great tool to help you send out emails. Picking the right ESP, or email service provider, is the first big step in your newsletter journey.

When it comes to choosing the right tech, there’s never been a better time to be an independent writer with a newsletter. You’ll have your choice of several great email tools that can help you sell subscriptions, easily integrate advertising, or run polls from within a newsletter.

But there are almost too many email options to choose from — literally, dozens of ESPs, many of which have very similar features. How do you choose one that’s best for you?

I’ve worked with newsletters on dozens of platforms and gotten the chance to see what works and what doesn’t. In this guide, I’ve narrowed the list down to six options I think are worth a closer look.

Let’s set some ground rules first:

First, these aren’t my recommendations for larger publishers, non-profits, or ecommerce businesses. In this article, I’m focused on the indie newsletter space. When I say “indie newsletters,” I mean newsletters launched by an individual or small team without the support or financial backing of a larger, established organization — these are people looking to build something on their own.

Second, there are a lot of great email options that I’ve excluded from this list. I’ve tried to pick tools that I think appeal to the broadest possible group of writers, but narrowing it down to a few options meant making some hard cuts. (And in some cases, I haven’t used an ESP enough to fully endorse it.)

These are the six tools I recommend you take a closer look at:

• AWeber
• Beehiiv
• ConvertKit
• Ghost
• Mailchimp
• Substack

In a moment, I’ll walk through what makes each of these platforms so useful, what they cost, and why they might be right for you.

And I want to be up front about this: I have some sort of partner or affiliate relationship with each of the six tools listed in this guide. I’ve also included affiliate links in here — if you use those links when signing up for one of these ESPs, I may receive a small commission. (Two exceptions: I don’t have an affiliate link for Mailchimp, and Substack’s commission is only paid out if a newsletter turns on a paid subscription.)

But this is the important part: All of these are tools I’ve used myself or with clients — they’re tools I like and independently recommend. I’d certainly appreciate it if you used the links in here — everything on inboxcollective.com is free, and this is one way you can support this work! But at the end of the day, the most important thing for me is that you find the right tool to help you build a great newsletter.

But before you pick your email platform…

I’ve found in working with indie newsletters that there are eight questions that can help you identify the right email tool. Go through these questions, figure out your answers — and then we’ll walk through the six ESPs and talk about which ones match up well with certain answers.

1.) Is your newsletter part of a larger website, or do you want it to be a standalone project?

Some indie newsletters keep things simple. Take the Arizona Agenda, which covers state politics in Arizona. Go to their website, arizonaagenda.com, and you’re taken directly to a page where you can see their previous stories and sign up to receive more. There’s no secondary website or additional content — everything they write and send exists within a single platform. It’s what I call a “simple publishing” approach — they use one platform to handle email and web content.

But some writers have a newsletter as part of a larger website. My site, Inbox Collective, is a good example of that: I have a website, where I publish original work, but also a separate newsletter. This approach is particularly common in the local news space — a writer might have a daily newsletter, but also publish several original pieces on their site every day.

2.) Are you OK spending money to send out your newsletter?

Most ESPs charge some sort of monthly fee to send out your newsletter. But a few pieces of good news: Almost all offer a discounted rate, usually a month or two for free, if you pay on an annual basis. And five of the six ESPs listed here have some sort of free tier, which varies based on the size of your list. On ConvertKit, for example, sending is free for up to 1,000 subscribers. On Beehiiv, you don’t have to pay anything if your list has 2,500 subscribers or less. Once you hit the limits of the free tier, you will have to move to a paid tier. But by that point, you may be monetizing your newsletter, which might offset the cost of using these tools.

To give you a sense of potential costs: Sending a newsletter to a list of about 5,000 readers might cost anywhere from a few hundred dollars to about $1,200 per year. As your list grows, the prices at most ESPs will also rise.

Before you start, know whether you’d be willing to spend some of your own money to send out your newsletter. If the answer is “no,” that’s OK — Substack doesn’t charge anything to send emails, regardless of list size, and might be a good option for you.

3.) Are you looking to make money off this newsletter?

Go into this newsletter launch with a clear sense of whether your goal is to bring in revenue via your newsletter. (Again, “no” is a perfectly fine answer — plenty of writers produce a newsletter for personal reasons, and that’s great!) You may not make a single dollar on your first day, or even in your first year, but you should know now if you aim to make money through this newsletter. It’ll help us identify the right ESP for you — each of these tools have very different strengths when it comes to driving revenue!

4.) How do you primarily intend to make money?

As Alex Hazlett and I wrote in our story about indie newsletter business models, there are a lot of ways to make money with your newsletter. A few common options:

• Selling a subscription or membership
• Asking readers for donations
• Selling advertising in your newsletter
• Selling ebooks, merchandise, or other products
• Using affiliate links to recommend other products
• Consulting, coaching, or teaching
• Hosting events or workshops
• Monetizing through some sort of indirect revenue (like paid talks or freelancing gigs that you land via your newsletter)

Your newsletter might include just one of these, or you might envision multiple revenue streams. If you do think there will be multiple options, try to decide which you’ll prioritize in the next year or two.

5.) Are you willing to give up a percentage of your revenue?

If you’re selling anything online, like a subscription or membership, or products, like merchandise or ebooks, you’re going to want to set up an account with Stripe, which is the tool that actually processes payments for all of the email platforms in this guide.

Stripe does have a big weakness: It’s only available in 46 countries, so if you’re running a newsletter outside of one of those countries, you might have to get creative about how you handle payments. One option I’d look at: PayPal’s recurring payments tool, which has higher fees than Stripe but is available more widely. (PayPal works in over 200 countries.) You can connect PayPal and most ESPs via Zapier, though it’ll require more work to sync things than through the native integrations (using Stripe) that these tools offer.

Stripe is free to set up, but it takes $0.30 of every payment you collect, plus 2.9% of the total payment amount. (A quick note: All payment amounts listed in this guide are in U.S. dollars.)

And this is where things get more complicated: You may end up paying fees to your email platform on top of Stripe’s cut.

Of the six tools listed below, five have a payments tool built in. (If you’re on Mailchimp, you’ll need to use a third-party tool to collect payments for a subscription or membership.) Here’s the cut that each takes of any revenue you bring in via their native payments tool — and yes, this is on top of the 2.9% (and $0.30) fee that Stripe takes:

• AWeber — 0.6%
• Beehiiv — 0%
• ConvertKit — 0.6%
• Ghost — 0%
• Substack — 10%

So let’s do some simple math here. You’ve launched a newsletter, and ask people to pay to subscribe. 1,000 readers pay to do so, at a rate of $100 per year. You’d be bringing in $100,000 in revenue per year — pretty impressive!

Stripe will take $3,200 of that —  $300 in one-time fees plus $2,900 in percentage fees. And then here’s what these other email platforms would take as part of their cut:

• AWeber — $600
• Beehiiv — $0
• ConvertKit — $600
• Ghost — $0
• Substack — $10,000

Why is Substack’s number so much higher? Unlike these other options, they don’t charge any monthly or annual fees to send out emails, but the trade-off is that they take a much higher cut of revenue. So let’s run the numbers again, but with annual fees included so you can get a truer sense of how your costs model out over the course of a year.

Let’s still assume that you’ve got 1,000 paying subscribers at $100 per year, but let’s also assume that you also have 25,000 total newsletter subscribers. (A 4% conversion rate would be pretty good for many newsletters. Anything between 5-10% would be considered exceptionally good.)

Email tool	Annual fees*	ESP cut	Stripe fees	Total cost
Beehiiv	$1,572	$0	$3,200	$4,772
Ghost	$1,980	$0	$3,200	$5,180
AWeber	$1,800	$600	$3,200	$5,600
ConvertKit	$1,990	$600	$3,200	$5,790
Mailchimp	$3,240	$5,200**	$3,200	$11,640
Substack	$0	$10,000	$3,200	$13,200

These numbers will change significantly based on the size of your audience. Run these numbers again with 100 paying subscribers instead of 1,000, and Substack becomes the cheapest platform to use. Run it with 100,000 overall subscribers instead of 25,000, and a platform like Mailchimp suddenly costs more than $9,600 per year to send from.

This becomes part of the trade-off when you’re picking an email platform: Finding an ESP that offers the right balance, for you, between regular payments (to use the platform) and revenue payouts (when you bring in money through paid subscriptions, memberships, or the sale of products). 

6.) Do you want your ESP to sell ads for you?

Many newsletters monetize through the sale of ads. Most independent writers, save for those with huge audiences (100,000 subscribers or more), tend to avoid programmatic ad tools, and instead sell directly to advertisers. These might include title sponsorships, native ads, or classifieds within a newsletter.

There are a lot of tools out there to help you sell ads for your newsletter, like Passionfroot, Paved, Sales Pro, or Sponsy. Those are all platform-agnostic — you could use them with any of the ESPs in this guide.

But two ESPs on this list, Beehiiv and ConvertKit, offer their own built-in ad networks. They sell ads on behalf of their newsletters, and you get to decide if the ad is a good fit for your newsletter. If you accept the placement, they give you the copy, images, and links to include, and you get paid after the ad runs. (Both Beehiiv and ConvertKit take a cut of the ad revenue.) For a newsletter operator who wants to bring in ad revenue without having to actually go and sell the ads themselves, using a built-in ad network might be a smart option.

7.) How much do you care about the design of your newsletter?

Some of these ESPs allow for minimal customization, and really put an emphasis on helping you send simple, clean, text-based newsletters. (Yes, you can add in images or embed social posts, but the emails are otherwise fairly simple.) Other ESPs allow for nearly unlimited customization — you can build a one-of-a-kind template for your newsletter. If the latter is what you want, it’ll help point you towards a handful of the options listed below.

8.) Are there other features you need out of an email platform?

Maybe you’re looking for an ESP that offers the ability to trigger some sort of automation, like a welcome series, after a reader takes a certain action. Maybe you’re looking for an ESP that integrates with a specific tool. (Part of the reason I moved to Mailchimp was because it integrated with with a number of tools that I use, like OptinMonster and WPForms, which I use to grow my email list.) Or maybe you’re looking for an ESP with a built-in referral program. Now’s a good time to decide: Are these the sorts of features you absolutely have to have in your ESP? Or would they be a nice bonus to have?

Let’s review your eight answers

Give yourself a minute to go back and answer these eight questions:

1. Is your newsletter part of a larger website, or do you want it to be a standalone project?
2. Are you OK spending money to send out your newsletter?
3. Are you looking to make money off this newsletter?
4. How do you primarily intend to make money?
5. Are you willing to give up a percentage of your revenue?
6. Do you want your ESP to sell ads for you?
7. How much do you care about the design of your newsletter?
8. Are there other features you need out of an email platform?

And once you’ve collected your answers, let’s dive in and look at six ESPs that might be right for your indie newsletter. (You can click or tap on any of these links to scroll ahead to that ESP.)

• AWeber
• Beehiiv
• ConvertKit
• Ghost
• Mailchimp
• Substack

AWeber

AWeber is perfect for someone who needs an email tool that has lots of bells and whistles, but at a reasonable price point.

It’s right for a writer who might be …
✅ Building a subscription or membership model, but wants low fees.
✅ Asking for donations from readers, or selling books or products.
✅ Building a website using WordPress + needs a newsletter to drive readers back to the site.
✅ Wants to design emails that look a certain way.
✅ Wants to build out basic automations, like a welcome series.

AWeber doesn’t just predate the creation of Gmail — it’s an ESP that’s older than Google itself. (By 15 days, though who’s counting?) There was a moment in the early 2000s where AWeber was the email tool of choice for writers on the web, and then a stretch where AWeber seemed far less relevant.

But in the past few years, AWeber’s quietly made a comeback. Their team has made significant improvements to the product, and they’re worth a closer look.

A few AWeber features I really like

• Their drag-and-drop builder lets you design emails that look the way you want — They have several out-of-the-box templates you can customize, or you can start from scratch and design something yourself. They also have an integration with Canva, which makes it easy to add illustrations or other design elements to your newsletters without leaving AWeber. If you need a custom template made, you can pay AWeber a one-time fee of $229 to design something for you. And if you need to edit your newsletter on the go, you can — their builder works in your browser if you need to make last-minute edits. (You don’t even have to download their app.)
• You can add stories to a newsletter just by dropping in a link — Have a section of your newsletter where you want to showcase a handful of stories, but don’t want to individually add in every headline, description, image, and link? AWeber lets you add a single link to your template, and it’ll automatically add all of the rest in for you. (This was one of my favorite features on Revue, the email platform that was purchased and later shuttered by Twitter, and I’m thrilled that AWeber’s built it into their template builder, too.)
• Their ecommerce tool is flexible — Want to sell a subscription or membership? You can do that with AWeber Ecommerce. Want to ask readers to make a one-time donation to your newsletter? Or sell ebooks, courses, or tickets to an event? You can do all of that, too. AWeber Ecommerce also allows you to create landing pages to start selling these products.
• They have free phone, chat, or email support for all paying users — If you’ve got issues, you can call their customer service team and get an actual human to help troubleshoot issues. (Phone lines are open from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. Eastern. Chat support is available seven days a week, and email support runs 24/7.)
• They built and maintain their own sending domain — Here’s something that might surprise you: Of the six email tools I’ve recommended here, only two are actually responsible for sending out your emails. (The others use a third-party ESP to send emails out.) What that means is that AWeber gets unusual insights into the deliverability of newsletters sent via their platform, and they can quickly spot and fix potential deliverability issues as a result.

• You can automate a welcome series or other types of emails — You can use their Automations tool to send a series of emails after a reader takes a specific action, like signing up for a newsletter or buying a ticket to an event. (Fun fact: AWeber founder Tom Kulzer developed the first autoresponder back in 1998.)
• They have lots of integrations an indie newsletter might need — They connect with Zapier (which integrates with basically every tool on the internet), as well as many CMS tools (like WordPress, Squarespace, and Wix). You can connect AWeber with growth tools like OptinMonster and analytics tools like Google Analytics. If you’d rather write your newsletters in WordPress, you can use Newsletter Glue to build there, then publish to both WordPress and your newsletter list with a single click.
• You can run lots of different A/B tests — You can test out different subject lines, send times, or newsletter formats, and even test out different embeddable sign-up forms on your website to see which best converts readers.
• You can tag users based on the links they click in a newsletter — Let’s say you’ve got a newsletter for parents, and you’re about to start selling an ebook aimed at helping newborns build good sleep habits. You might want to be able to identify which parents on your list have a newborn so you can email them about the ebook, right? The next time you send a newsletter with content about newborns, you can tell AWeber, “If someone clicks on this link about newborn babies, tag them as being interested in newborn content.” It’s a neat feature that allows you to do segmentation and targeting without requiring too much extra work.
• They’ve built an AI tool into their email builder — AWeber AI can write up a few sentences — or an entire email draft — for you in just a few seconds. It can also check your spelling, adjust the tone of your email, or simplify a complicated paragraph down to a single sentence, and it’s all integrated directly into the builder where you write your newsletter.
• You can add AMP for Email elements to your newsletter — You may not know what AMP for Email is, but I’m betting you’ve used it before. An example: Let’s say you’re working on a Google Doc with a colleague, and they leave a comment for you to answer. Google sends you an email and has a comment box right there in the email for you to reply to. That’s an AMP for Email element — and AWeber allows you to add elements just like that within your email. (None of the other ESPs on this list support AMP.) These are great for running surveys or polls within your newsletter.
• If you have an existing email list, they’ll migrate you over to AWeber for free — It’s a nice feature for those who already have a newsletter on another platform and need help setting things up in AWeber.
• They’ve been around forever, and aren’t going anywhere — AWeber’s been around longer than Google, and they’re not backed by investors who are looking to flip the company for a quick buck. If you go with AWeber, you’re picking an ESP that should be around for years to come.

What doesn’t AWeber do?

There are two things that AWeber lacks that some of the other email tools on this list offer:

One is that they don’t have an advertising network built in. You can always use a third-party tool — or sell ads yourself — if you want to monetize your newsletter through advertising.

And while AWeber does create a shareable URL for any newsletters you send, they don’t create a standalone website featuring all of your old newsletters, like Beehiiv or Substack or do. (If you’re on WordPress, you can always re-create this feature on your own site using Newsletter Glue.)

What does AWeber cost?

AWeber has four different plans, but I’d recommend looking at the AWeber Plus plan, which should give you access to all of the features you need.

AWeber’s pricing tiers are fairly broad. (For instance, if you have anywhere between 10,000 and 25,000 newsletter subscribers, you’ll pay one set price.) But there are price differences for lists under 5,000 subscribers. To simplify things, I’ve listed the maximum price for that range.

• If you have up to 500 subscribers, AWeber is free.
• If you have 500 to 5,000 subscribers, you’ll pay up to $600/year.
• If you have 5,000 to 10,000 subscribers, you’ll pay $840/year.
• If you have 10,000 to 25,000 subscribers, you’ll pay $1,800/year.

AWeber supports newsletters larger than 25,000 subscribers — you can find their pricing page via this link.

They also take a 0.6% cut of anything sold through AWeber Ecommerce, which does not include Stripe’s cut (2.9% + $0.30 per transaction).

Beehiiv

Beehiiv is perfect for someone trying to blend a subscription or membership model with advertising.

It’s right for a writer who …

It’s right for a writer who …
✅ Wants a simple publishing experience.
✅ Wants to sell advertising (but doesn’t want to sell ads themselves).
✅ Is building a subscription/membership model and wants to give up 0% of revenue.
✅ Wants to be able to track engagement based on referral source.
✅ Wants a referral program built into their email platform.
✅ Wants to run polls or surveys within their newsletter.

Launched in summer 2021, Beehiiv is the new ESP option on the block, and they’ve got an interesting background: Several key members of their team were early employees at Morning Brew. With Beehiiv, they’re trying to build the ESP they wish they could’ve had at the Brew.

At first glance, you might see Beehiiv as a copycat of Substack, but they’ve tried to zig where Substack’s zagged. Substack takes a 10% cut of all subscriptions and has said they won’t support advertising on their platform. Beehiiv takes a 0% cut of subscriptions and is building out an ad network to make it easier for newsletters to monetize through ads.

Those two points of differentiation — plus all of the new features they’ve rolled out recently, from a referral tool to publisher-friendly analytics — make Beehiiv an ESP worth considering.

A few Beehiiv features I really like

• They’ve got their own built-in advertising network — If you want to monetize your newsletter through ads but don’t want to sell ads yourself, you can join the Beehiiv ad network. (It’s an optional feature — you don’t have to sell ads in your newsletter if you don’t want to.) If you do join, Beehiiv sells ads to premium advertisers, like Brooklinen or BetterHelp, across their network of newsletters, and then gives you the ability to easily add the sponsorship into your next newsletter. You can accept or reject any ad placement, and can choose from several format options for your specific newsletter. If you do place the ad, you get paid out — payouts vary based on the size and engagement of your audience. (Beehiiv takes a cut of ads sold.) Beehiiv also made a major investment this year by purchasing Swapstack, a previously independent ad platform for newsletters, bringing even more ad partners and tools to Beehiiv.
• You can send and publish from one place — If you’re looking to keep things simple — just a single place to publish all of your work and send out your newsletters — Beehiiv is a great option. You don’t need to have a standalone website. You can buy a custom domain, set up your newsletter through Beehiiv there, and publish/send everything from one place. They let you customize both the landing page where readers sign up for your newsletter and the upgrade page where readers can pay for a subscription or membership. Beehiiv’s also made their tool SEO-friendly, so the work you publish can be found by readers via search.
• They offer analytics to track a variety of data points — Their dashboards can show you the basic data (opens, clicks), but also where your email audience is coming from. You can even dive in to look at engagement among a specific segment of your audience. For instance, if you’re running a Facebook ad to grow your list, you can use Beehiiv’s dashboard to see if the users who signed up via that ad end up engaging with your newsletter. That should help you identify which growth tactics are worth investing more in, and which you might want to stop doing. The ability to drill down into specific segments within Beehiiv makes their dashboards unusually powerful, in particular for any newsletter that’s aggressively growing through paid ads. (I wrote more about how users are taking advantage of Beehiiv’s 3D Analytics in this case study.)
• Their email builder keeps things simple — You can fully customize your email templates if you want to dive into the HTML (or hire someone to do so), but Beehiiv’s standard template is still pretty flexible. You can adjust the fonts, colors, or other styles you want to make your newsletter stand out. You can embed elements like tweets or YouTube videos within a newsletter. (If there’s a video that needs to be played, a reader will have to click out of the email to watch it. That’s the case for every ESP I’ve listed in this guide — video and email don’t play nicely.) One other feature I love (and that I wish other ESPs would try): If your newsletter is getting a little long and might get clipped in Gmail, Beehiiv’s builder will warn you before sending. (Clipping sometimes causes deliverability issues, and can definitely affect the number of clicks you see from a newsletter.)

• They’ve built their own referral tool — Tyler Denk, Beehiiv’s co-founder, was one of the engineers who helped build out Morning Brew’s referral program, so it’s no surprise that Beehiiv’s made this one of their key selling points. You can set up a referral program within Beehiiv to allow readers to share the newsletter with friends in exchange for rewards of your choosing.
• You can recommend other newsletters on the Beehiiv platform — This intra-Beehiiv network could be a source of audience growth for your newsletter, particularly as Beehiiv grows its network of newsletters. Beehiiv also offers a paid recommendation engine, called Boosts — you can pay other Beehiiv newsletters to recommend your newsletter, or get paid (often $1-2 per subscriber) to recommend other newsletters. With Boosts, you’re only paying (or getting paid) if a reader actually engages with the newsletter after signing up, unlike most other forms of paid ads, where you’re paying regardless of whether they open or click.
• They offer support for newsletters in languages other than English — Many ESPs are built to work only in English — the language on a double opt-in email, for instance, is in English, even if you write in Spanish, and that email can’t be edited. With Beehiiv, you can choose from a few popular languages, including Spanish, French, and Portuguese, so readers will always see the language that matches what you write in.
• They have a lot of integrations — Thanks to their Zapier integration, as well as the ability to create custom webhooks, Beehiiv now integrates with basically any tool on the web.
• Newsletter polling is built into the platform — Want to poll your audience or run a quiz within your newsletter? You can do that right from Beehiiv, and readers can engage with the polls or quizzes without leaving their inbox.
• They’ve added an AI tool to their email builder — Beehiiv’s AI tool can check your spelling or grammar, write newsletter copy, or adjust your tone. But it can also generate images from AI — just type in the idea for the image, and the AI tool will create the image and add it to your newsletter. If you need to translate something into a different language, it can do that, too.
• If you have an existing email list, they’ll help you migrate over to Beehiiv — If your newsletter is on another platform — or if you’re offering a subscription product on another platform — they’ll help move everything over to Beehiiv for free.
• They’re quickly rolling out new features — I’ve been impressed by how quickly they’ve been able to get to feature parity with other ESPs. Just in the past year, they’ve rolled out several key new features — a more sophisticated automation tool, advanced segmentation, and A/B testing — with new features dropping seemingly every month.

What doesn’t Beehiiv do?

Beehiiv doesn’t maintain their own sending platform, but they do take several steps to monitor deliverability. They use an email validation tool to make sure that every email address that gets added to your list is valid, and they give you the ability to use a dedicated IP address if you want to do so. (If you’re curious: They use SendGrid to send out their emails.) If you want to use double opt-in, you can toggle that on (and you can also set up a reminder email to go out to readers who sign up but forget to click the link in those confirmation emails).

Unlike some of the platforms in this guide, they don’t offer phone support for customers. If you have an issue or technical problem, you can reach out to them via email or X, formerly known as Twitter. (They tend to reply super quickly via DM, and within 24-48 hours via email, depending on your plan tier.)

What does Beehiiv cost?

Like many of the other ESPs in this guide, Beehiiv has several different tiers based on the number of subscribers on your list. Unlike some other ESPs, however, Beehiiv does not put a cap on the number of emails you can send per month.

Beehiiv offers two primary plans:

• Their Scale plan includes access to 3D Analytics, the ability to have three different newsletters brands underneath one account, access to their referral tool and ad network, and the ability to set up automations.
• Their Max plan includes everything on Scale, plus the option to remove Beehiiv branding at the bottom of a newsletter, the ability to have 10 different newsletter brands under one account, and priority support.

Most newsletter operators would be just fine on Beehiiv’s Scale plan. Here’s what Beehiiv would cost for newsletters at certain subscriber thresholds:

• If you have up to 2,500 subscribers, Beehiiv is free.
• If you have 2,500 to 5,000 subscribers, you’ll pay up to $828/year.
• If you have 5,000 to 10,000 subscribers, you’ll pay $1,044/year.
• If you have 10,000 to 25,000 subscribers, you’ll pay $1,572/year.

Beehiiv supports newsletters larger than 25,000 subscribers — you can find their pricing page at this link.

Beehiiv does not take a cut of any paid subscriptions or memberships. (You’ll only pay the Stripe fee.)

ConvertKit

ConvertKit is perfect for someone who needs advanced automations to sell stuff — and who might also be monetizing through subscriptions, memberships, or ads.

It’s right for a writer who …
✅ Is hoping to sell stuff (a subscription, ebooks, classes, workshops).
✅ Wants to sell advertising, but doesn’t want to sell ads themselves.
✅ Wants super-advanced automations to handle specific customer journeys.
✅ Wants to tag users based on the things they click on within a newsletter.
✅ Is focused on creating content, not design.

In fall 2012, Nathan Barry was an app developer who created a digital guide for building iPhone apps and started selling it online. As the guide started to sell, he realized many of his customers came via one source: His email list. 

That was a lightbulb moment for him. He pivoted away from developing apps and created ConvertKit, an email platform designed to help others like him use email to build an audience and monetize it. Long before the word “creator” was part of the modern lexicon, ConvertKit was building a product designed to serve people who were creating independent businesses online.

And they’ve continued to roll out new features, like ConvertKit Commerce and their Creator Network, which can help an indie newsletter grow and succeed. It’s one of the reasons ConvertKit is such an attractive option for your newsletter. 

A few ConvertKit features I really like

• Their automation tool is one of the most advanced in the industry — Yes, you can use ConvertKit to set up a basic automation, like a handful of emails in welcome series after someone signs up. But you can also set up branched automations, where readers get a series of emails personalized based on what you know about them. For instance: With ConvertKit, a reader could be shown a poll in the first welcome email. When they click on one of the options in that poll, ConvertKit could apply a tag to their profile. In the next email, you might then show them specific content — or even a pitch to pay — based on the tag. And all of this can happen automatically, without requiring any intervention after the initial set-up. (There’s lots of work that goes into planning out these journeys and writing the emails, but setting them up in ConvertKit is fairly easy.)
• Their sponsor network sells ads on behalf of writers — ConvertKit users can apply to join their sponsor network, where they’re bringing in advertisers like ButcherBox and Duolingo to advertise in newsletters. A caveat: You’ve got to publish regularly and have at least 10,000 subscribers to join the ConvertKit ad network. But if you’re accepted, they’ll sell ads on your behalf, freeing you up to focus on other sources of revenue. (ConvertKit takes 20% of ads sold, plus Stripe’s 2.9% fee.) How much could an ad be worth in your newsletter? ConvertKit says that for every thousand readers who open a newsletter, you should make about $15.
• They have a referral program and recommendation engine built into the platform — ConvertKit purchased SparkLoop in 2023 and integrated it into ConvertKit. So if you want to set up a referral program, you can do so without having to pay for any third-party tools. But SparkLoop’s integration into the platform also meant the launch of their Creator Network, where you can get paid to recommend other newsletters, often at a rate of $1-3 per subscriber. Interestingly, these newsletters don’t have to be on ConvertKit — several prominent newsletters on other platforms pay to be a part of this network. If you want to pay other newsletters to recommend your newsletter, you can also do that through the Creator Network.
• You can sell subscriptions, courses, or products via ConvertKit Commerce — Like with AWeber, ConvertKit has their own tool that allows you to sell stuff directly to readers. That might mean on-demand courses or merchandise, but it could also be a subscription or membership to your newsletter. You can also use it to set up a tip jar where readers can voluntarily contribute to support your newsletter.

• Their email builder offers several templates for you to build off of — ConvertKit’s long encouraged users to keep things super simple with their email templates — mostly just text and images. But they have significantly upgraded their template builder in the past 12 months. You can build your newsletter one of two different ways: You can use their Starting Points templates, which are basic templates that allow for lots of customization. Or you can use one of the free templates from the ConvertKit Marketplace, which offers fully-built newsletters templates you can use right out of the box. (You can customize these to your liking, too.) Their email builder also has some unique features, like the ability to add a countdown clock to an email, which might help create urgency for a sale or free trial.
• They have a ton of integrations available — The big one is Zapier — through that, you can connect ConvertKit to just about anything on the web. They also have integrations with other tools, from common CMS options (like WordPress, Squarespace, or Wix) to community tools, like Mighty Networks, to growth tools, like OptinMonster. Their integration with RightMessage, which can be used to collect more data about a user at the point of sign-up, is particularly powerful.
• You can set up landing pages for lead magnets or use their embeddable forms on your site — If you want to go the “simple publishing” approach — writing a newsletter and publishing it on a custom domain with a single click — you can do that using ConvertKit’s landing pages. (It takes a few extra steps to set up compared to what you can do on Beehiiv or Substack.) You can also use their landing pages in tandem with ConvertKit Commerce — you can start selling stuff to readers via a landing page, and then use their automation tool to send a follow-up series after the purchase is complete. And if you want sign-up boxes or pop-ups you can add to your own website, ConvertKit offers those, too.
• They offer customer support via email or chat — If you do need support for email issues, they offer all users access to customer support from a real human.
• If you have an existing email list, they’ll help you migrate over to ConvertKit — If your newsletter is on another platform, they’ll help move everything over to ConvertKit at no charge.
• They’re independently owned and not for sale — In 2021, Spotify tried to buy ConvertKit — and ConvertKit turned them down. At this point, it’s safe to say they’re not for sale, which should give you comfort if you’re worried about picking an ESP that might shutter or sell at some point in the next year or two.

What doesn’t ConvertKit do?

ConvertKit emails technically go out through SendGrid, but they’ve still made a sizable investment in deliverability. They have an in-house team that handles deliverability issues, run their own domains, and publish a monthly report on deliverability. (For instance: In November 2023, they delivered over 2.9 billion emails, with an average open rate of 43 percent.)

What does ConvertKit cost?

ConvertKit has two different tiers: The Creator tier and the Creator Pro tier. The big difference? Creator Pro gives users access to the built-in referral program, plus advanced reporting.

ConvertKit also has a lot of pricing tiers — pricing for 8,000 newsletter subscribers, for instance, is slightly lower than pricing for 10,000 subscribers. To simplify things, I’ve listed the maximum price for each of the ranges below.

If you have up to 1,000 subscribers, ConvertKit is free.

On Creator:

• If you have 1,000 to 5,000 subscribers, you’ll pay up to $790/year.
• If you have 5,000 to 10,000 subscribers, you’ll pay up to $1,190/year.
• If you have 10,000 to 25,000 subscribers, you’ll pay up to $1,990/year.

On Creator Pro:

• If you have 1,000 to 5,000 subscribers, you’ll pay up to $1,100/year.
• If you have 5,000 to 10,000 subscribers, you’ll pay up to $1,670/year.
• If you have 10,000 to 25,000 subscribers, you’ll pay up to $2,790/year.

ConvertKit supports newsletters larger than 25,000 subscribers — you can find their pricing page via this link.

They also take a 0.6% cut of anything sold through ConvertKit Commerce, not including Stripe’s cut (2.9% + $0.30 per transaction).

Ghost

Ghost is perfect for the indie operator who’s trying to build out a publication — not just a newsletter.

It’s right for a writer who …
✅ Wants an an all-in-one publishing tool with WordPress-like features.
✅ Is building a subscription or membership model, and wants to give up 0% of revenue.
✅ Likes to be able to customize their templates and designs.
✅ Wants lots of different integrations.
✅ Might be tech-savvy enough to self-host their website + newsletter.

Many of the platforms in this guide started as a way to send newsletters but have started to act more like a suite of publishing tools. Many added additional features — the ability to publish newsletters publicly, accept payments, or comment on posts — that mirror what a content management system (or CMS) would offer.

Ghost has gone the opposite direction. They were once a traditional CMS tool, originally built as a competitor to WordPress, but over time, have rolled out more advanced email features to compete with ESPs.

The combination of CMS + ESP is an interesting one, and makes Ghost a compelling option.

A few Ghost features I really like

• They’re an all-in-one publishing tool — Options like Beehiiv or Substack allow for what I call “simple publishing”: With a single click, you can publish something as both a newsletter and an article on your website. (Both of those tools do allow you to choose where you want to publish: Your newsletter, site, or both.) But some writers want even more control — they’re looking to create a standalone website, and need a full CMS to manage what they publish to that site. Ghost is the only tool in this guide with that kind of flexibility. It’s a platform that acts more like WordPress than a standalone ESP. (Ghost founder John O’Nolan was a longtime contributor to WordPress, and his experience with that platform inspired Ghost.) Let’s say you’re building a small team that might be publishing frequently on a website, but also might have a newsletter (or several newsletters) under a single publishing umbrella. You can easily do that using only Ghost. Readers can leave comments on your site, like you could do on WordPress. Plus, Ghost offers lots of publisher-friendly features, like the ability to create an RSS feed based on a tag or author, which you could pair with Zapier to send out breaking news alerts or emails when a favorite author publishes a new story.
• They offer a ton of different tools to grow your newsletter — Ghost offers a variety of sign-up forms, which you can customize to your liking and embed either on your site or other sites. You can create custom landing pages or lead magnets through Ghost. They’ve also added an announcement bar, which you could use to drive readers to your newsletter landing page.
• They have their own recommendations tool — After a reader signs up for your newsletter, you can promote other newsletters afterwards. But one fun twist for Ghost’s Recommendations feature: You can promote a newsletter on any email platform. With some newsletters, you can offer a one-click sign-up option; with others, on platforms like Substack, readers can click and be driven to that newsletter’s sign-up page.
• You can customize both your website and your newsletter to look the way you want it —  Ghost offers a marketplace with different designs you can use for free, as well as more advanced templates you can purchase off the shelf. They also have a network of experts who you can hire to do additional customization if you need it. (This might cost anywhere from a few hundred dollars to thousands of dollars.)
• They don’t take a cut of any payments you collect — They’re one of only two options in this guide who take a 0% cut of subscription or membership revenue. (You still have to use Stripe, so you will give up the 2.9% + $0.30 there.) You can also set up multiple pricing tiers, with custom benefits for each level of subscription or membership, and even customize the payments page to look the way you want.

• They’re the only open-source tool on this list — Ghost is open-source software, like WordPress. That means that anyone can take Ghost’s code and modify it to their liking — something developers and tech-savvy operators tend to love. Ghost is also rare in that it allows you to self-host your site and newsletter if you choose. (But as I’ll explain in the pricing section: Unless you’re a developer, this probably isn’t the right option for you.) But the biggest thing about being open-source: It means Ghost isn’t for sale, and anyone launching on Ghost can feel confident that the platform will be around for years to come.
• It’s really easy to write newsletters in Ghost — The editor is super easy to create newsletters in. You can use their editor on your phone, which means you can write posts or newsletters on the go, and you can edit photos — to crop, add a filter, or add a border to an image — right there within the editor. And if you’ve got the Grammarly browser extension installed, you can automatically have your work copyedited in their editor as you write your next newsletter.
• They have a ton of integrations — The most important two: Zapier, which allows you to connect Ghost to just about any tool on the web, and Google Analytics. If you’d rather accept donations (Ghost is built around subscriptions or memberships), you could use Zapier to connect Ghost to a tool like Donorbox. They also offer integrations with Discourse (to create forums where readers can discuss big topics) or Shopify (to sell merchandise or products). 
• You can segment readers by open rate — Want to create a segment of readers who’ve opened less than, say, 25% of your newsletters? You can identify readers based on criteria like this — and then set up segments to include or exclude those readers from specific newsletters. (You can also create segments based on emails sent or emails opened.)
• You can turn off email tracking — Some newsletters, usually as part of a privacy promise to readers, don’t want to track data like open rate or click rate. If you’re not interested in collecting that data, you can toggle either (or both) of those data points off.
• If you have an existing email list, they can help you migrate over to Ghost — If your newsletter is on another platform, they’ll help move everything over to Ghost for free, as long as you pay for a year of Ghost up front.

What doesn’t Ghost do?

One key thing that Ghost lacks: You can’t set up automations, like a welcome series to new subscribers. (If you want to do so, connect Zapier and use their email tool to set up a welcome series. Ghost has an explainer here to walk you through it.) The lack of automations isn’t a deal-breaker — but those automations can be really useful for welcoming new readers, winning back inactive readers, or nudging paying subscribers to renew a subscription. You’ll have to do extra work outside the platform to set up these automations, and there will be additional costs (for tools like Zapier) to do so.

Ghost also isn’t responsible for sending their own sending domain; they use a third-party tool called Mailgun to send out newsletters. (Their team tells me that they do have a team in place to monitor and handle email best practices.) One interesting differentiator from the others in this guide is that only users on their Business tier (which is their premium tier for large organizations) can set up their own custom sending domain. Otherwise, Ghost takes care of email authentication for you.

Ghost’s membership dashboards are quite robust — you can see audience trends, revenue data, and sign-up sources all in one place — but their email data is fairly basic. You’ll be able to see open rate and click rate (assuming you’ve chosen to track that), as well as feedback data (via a thumbs up/down question in your footer) and whether a newsletter led to new paid subscribers.

Ghost doesn’t offer any sort of phone or chat support — all customer support is handled through email. The one exception is for readers on their Business plan, which is their most expensive plan. Those users do get a dedicated account manager to talk to.

What does Ghost cost?

The pricing options on Ghost require a bit of explanation.

Much like WordPress, Ghost is open-source software, and you’ve got two options: You can self-host on Ghost, or use their hosting service, called Ghost(Pro). My take: Unless you’re unusually tech-savvy, self-hosting is probably not the right option for you. (I’ll explain more about self-hosting below.)

So if you go with Ghost(Pro), there are four different tiers to choose from. For most indie newsletters, only two of these tiers will make sense: Creator or Team. The big differences? The number of user logins to your account, and the number of newsletter products you can send. (By this, I don’t mean the number of newsletters you can send per month — Ghost would define a daily newsletter as one product, a weekly newsletter as another, a monthly letter from your editor as a third, and so on.)

• On the Creator plan, you can have two staff users and three newsletters.
• On Team, you can have five staff users and ten newsletters.

Ghost(Pro) also has a Business plan with unlimited staff users and newsletters, though I can count on one hand the number of indie newsletters that would actually need to be on that tier.

Once you’ve picked between the Creator and Team tiers, pricing is based on the number of members you have in your audience. To get the number of members for your account, add up the number of free newsletter subscribers on your list plus the number of paying subscribers for your newsletter. (You won’t pay twice for a paying subscriber who gets a newsletter.) Like with other options listed in this guide, you’ll pay a different price for different list sizes. To simplify things, I’ve listed the maximum price for each of the ranges below.

On Creator:

• If you have up to 500 members, you’ll pay $300.
• If you have 500 to 5,000 members, you’ll pay up to $780/year.
• If you have 5,000 to 10,000 members, you’ll pay up to $1,188/year.
• If you have 10,000 to 25,000 members, you’ll pay up to $1,980/year.

On Team:

• If you have up to 500 members, you’ll pay $600.
• If you have 500 to 5,000 members, you’ll pay up to $1,104/year.
• If you have 5,000 to 10,000 members, you’ll pay up to $1,668/year.
• If you have 10,000 to 25,000 members, you’ll pay up to $2,784/year.

One more thing: There is no Ghost(Pro) free option, though they do offer a two-week free trial.

Ghost(Pro) supports indie publications with more than 25,000 members — you can find their pricing page via this link.

You could also decide to self-host on Ghost, but that gets complicated quickly — Ghost has a useful guide about the differences between self-hosting and Ghost(Pro). (A simple test for this: Do you know what ​​Node.js is? If the answer is “no,” don’t go the self-hosting route.) If you do self-host, one consideration: You’ll need to set up a Mailgun account and pay additional fees to send out your emails. Depending on your list size, this should cost an additional $35 to $75 per month.

One less complicated aspect of the platform: Ghost does not take a cut of any paid subscription or membership. (You will still have to pay Stripe’s fees, however.)

Mailchimp

Mailchimp is perfect for someone looking for a marketing solution with lots of integrations.

It’s right for a writer who …
✅ Wants to be able to customize every part of their email template.
✅ Needs all sorts of integrations.
✅ Needs a way to store a lot of different data points about a reader.
✅ Wants to be able to create lots of automations.
✅ May have several members of a team working within the email platform.

Let’s be clear: Mailchimp wasn’t built with independent writers in mind. It’s a marketing platform created for small businesses, which explains why a lot of the features it offers — like the ability to send postcards or view your upcoming calendar of marketing emails — don’t really apply to someone like you. (In 2021, Intuit — the company that makes tools for small businesses, like QuickBooks — bought Mailchimp for about $12 billion.)

But Mailchimp’s also one of the biggest senders of emails on the planet, and despite their branding (Mailchimp’s own landing pages tout them as “The All-in-one Marketing Platform Built for Small Businesses”), it’s a platform used by both small teams and individual writers. It’s absolutely worth a look.

A few Mailchimp features I really like

• Their drag-and-drop builder lets you design emails that look the way you want — Mailchimp has one of the most flexible email builders on the market, and they offer tons of pre-built templates you can customize. You can also design HTML templates from scratch and use those if you’d like.
• They offer hundreds of integrations — This has long been Mailchimp’s superpower: They’ve got an integration for just about everything. The integrations with Zapier and Google Analytics are most important, but you can also take advantage of direct integrations with payment platforms like Patreon. If you’re on WordPress, you can use Newsletter Glue to build your newsletters there, then publish via both WordPress and Mailchimp with a single click.
• Their Customer Journeys tool allows you to create powerful automations — Want to create a welcome series for new newsletter readers, but then split off that automation into two branches based on whether that reader’s a paying subscriber, member, or donor? That’s possible with Customer Journeys. You can use it for all sorts of email-specific journeys, or to keep your lists organized.
• You can A/B test any part of your newsletter — You can test out subject lines or new designs, and you can even run multiple A/B tests at once on the same newsletter. (This tends to work best if you have a large email list — at least 20,000 subscribers, so you can create testing segments large enough to return useful data.)

• You can store lots of different data points on a subscriber — Mailchimp allows you to tag a user (based on their interests or habits) or store specific data points (like a reader’s location) using merge tags. You can then use these to create different segments within Mailchimp to target specific users with a specific message.
• They have their own survey tool — Their survey tool works a lot like Google Forms — anything you can do there, you can do in Mailchimp’s survey tool — but with a useful twist: You can tag users based on their responses to the survey, which can help you identify specific readers to target in future emails. You can even pair surveys with Customer Journeys. For instance, with surveys for your own newsletter, you can ask readers if they want to sign up for additional newsletters. If they say yes, you can use Customer Journeys to add those readers to the correct newsletter list.
• They maintain their own sending domain — Mailchimp is one of only two ESPs on this list that is fully responsible for sending out your emails (instead of using a third-party ESP to do so). That gives their deliverability team additional insight into what’s happening in the delivery process. They also deploy an in-house tool, Omnivore, to automatically monitor your list for spammy emails and monitor the entire platform for spammy senders.
• They’ve built some AI features into the platform — The AI tool, called Intuit Assist, is designed to suggest content tweaks or even build entire emails for you. One caveat: The tool seems tailored more towards companies in the ecommerce space, not indie newsletters. But Mailchimp does seem to be going all-in on AI — they say they’ll be rolling out new features to allow users to set up audience segments or data reports using AI.
• They offer super-fast support via chat — An actual human from Mailchimp’s support team usually responds within two to three minutes if you’re utilizing their chat feature. (When logged in, click on the black question mark in the bottom right corner to get access to chat.) They also offer support via email, though you may not get a same-day reply through email — I always encourage clients to use chat instead.
• You can set up landing pages using their tool — You can connect these landing pages to a custom domain, and even tag users in a specific way if they come through these landing pages. (Many newsletters use this feature to track sign-ups that come via social media or QR codes.)
• You can use reCAPTCHA at the point of sign-up — This is a great way to keep your lists free of spammy sign-ups. If you want to use double opt-in or need GDPR-friendly forms, you can also do that with Mailchimp.
• They’ve added the ability to send text messages to readers — Their SMS tool allows you to send texts to readers at an additional cost. (Sending 10,000 messages will cost an additional $90.) One more caveat with the SMS tool: Even if you have permission to email a reader, you still need them to grant separate permission to allow you to send them text messages.
• Their Expert network is available for additional support — Mailchimp offers a list of pre-approved email experts with deep experience on the platform. (Full disclosure: Inbox Collective is one of them.) Whatever you need help with in Mailchimp, you’ll find several experts who you can hire to take care of it.

What doesn’t Mailchimp do?

The big one: Mailchimp shuttered the ability to set up your own digital storefront, as of February 2024. If you’re selling a subscription or membership to readers, you’ll need to use a third-party tool to do so, like Memberful or RevEngine, and then use one of Mailchimp’s many integrations to pass that data into Mailchimp.

I mentioned that Mailchimp’s email builder is a strength of the product, and that’s true. But while it’s great for creating beautifully-designed emails, it also isn’t as easy to write in as some of the other options offered in this guide. (Be especially careful when copy-and-pasting in any text, as formatting can get a little wonky.)

I also find that many of Mailchimp’s integrations have interesting quirks. For instance, users who come via their Stripe or Shopify integrations may be tagged as ineligible to receive regular newsletters, unless they check a box during the checkout process opting into those types of messages. For some integrations, I’d recommend connecting things through Zapier (even in cases where Mailchimp has a native integration), since Zapier gives you the ability to customize what data gets passed through to Mailchimp.

There’s also no advertising network built in, though some third-party tools, like Letterhead, do offer integrations with Mailchimp.

What does Mailchimp cost?

Mailchimp offers four different tiers, including a free plan that allows you to send up to 1,000 emails per month. (That plan has some limitations — you can’t run A/B tests or even schedule a newsletter for a future time.)

Most indie newsletters would be best served on either the Essentials or Standard plans. The big differences here: Standard gives you the ability to add additional users to your account (five vs. three) and full access to Customer Journeys. With Essentials, you can send automations like a welcome series, but it’ll require using Mailchimp’s less sophisticated Classic Automations tool.

Like with many of the other tools in this guide, Mailchimp has a variety of pricing tiers. To simplify things, I’ve listed the maximum price for each of the ranges below.

On Essentials:

• If you have up to 5,000 subscribers, you’ll pay up to $900/year.
• If you have 5,000 to 10,000 subscribers, you’ll pay up to $1,320/year.
• If you have 10,000 to 25,000 subscribers, you’ll pay up to $3,240/year.

On Standard: 

• If you have up to 5,000 subscribers, you’ll pay up to $1,200/year.
• If you have 5,000 to 10,000 subscribers, you’ll pay up to $1,620/year.
• If you have 10,000 to 25,000 subscribers, you’ll pay up to $3,720/year.

Mailchimp also puts limits on the number of newsletters you can send per month. If you’re sending just a few times a week, you shouldn’t have any issues, but if you’re sending a daily newsletter, I’d recommend reading this first to make sure you don’t incur any overage fees.

Substack

Substack is perfect for someone focused on building a paid subscription or membership.

It’s right for a writer who …
✅ Wants to sell a paid subscription or membership to readers.
✅ Wants a simple publishing experience.
✅ Runs a podcast alongside their newsletter.
✅ Wants to run polls or surveys within their newsletter.
✅ Might have friends or colleagues who also publish on Substack.
✅ Isn’t monetizing the newsletter and just wants a place to publish (for free).

Substack is last on this list (for alphabetical reasons), but certainly not least. Before Substack, trying to launch a paid subscription newsletter as an independent writer would’ve required using a handful of different tools (and, for many writers, keeping a tech consultant on retainer) just to get the newsletter off the ground. With Substack, launching a paid newsletter became something that literally any writer, regardless of their level of tech savvy, could do. Substack proved that with the right technology, great writers could make a living just by creating great, original work.

Despite competition from other email tools, they’ve stayed a leader in this space because of how easy it is to use the platform — it’s easy to set up a subscription business on Substack, and it’s really easy to write and publish. They also continue to roll out lots of new, writer-friendly features. For writers who are going independent for the first time, it’s a great option. They’ve made it so you can focus on writing your newsletters, and Substack handles the rest.

That’s why it’s an email tool you’ll want to take a closer look at.

A few Substack features I really like

• It’s still one of the easiest platforms to launch a subscription business on — Setting up a subscription on Substack is something you can do, in minutes, as part of the set-up process for your new newsletter. And Substack’s subscription-related analytics are really strong. Right when you log into the app, you’ll see data about your overall growth, annual revenue projections, and open rates. Want to dive in further? You can see which newsletters led to new paying subscriptions or overall newsletter growth, and you can easily put content behind a subscription wall. (Most of Substack’s own marketing is built around subscriptions, so I’ll use that language here, though you can run a membership program through Substack. Still, there’s a reason the platform is called Substack and not Membstack.)
• They don’t charge any monthly or annual fees to use the platform — You can send as many newsletters as you want via Substack, and they won’t charge you for it. If you’ve got 100 readers or a million readers, if you send once a week or once a day, you’ll pay the same price: Nothing. 
• You can send and publish from one place — You don’t need to have a standalone website if you’re on Substack. You can set up your newsletter on a custom domain, then publish to both that site and your newsletter with a single click. (Substack charges a one-time $50 fee to set up a custom domain.) You can choose which content remains free, and which is only for paying subscribers. Readers can comment on stories, and they’ve added the ability to adjust headlines and descriptions for SEO-savvy writers.

• Their editor is really easy to use — This is one of the things Substack users tell me they like most about the platform. The editor is super straightforward to use and puts the emphasis on your content. It’s easy to write in, and simple to add in audio or content from social networks. If you want to make part of a newsletter free to all, and part accessible only to paying subscribers, you can decide exactly where that cut-off point should be, and Substack handles the rest.
• Their recommendations tools can be a major source of growth — Substack allows any newsletter to recommend other newsletters that are also on Substack. When you recommend another newsletter, your new subscribers will get the chance to opt-in to those newsletters, with a single click, after signing up for yours. (Substack may also email your existing readers to let them know you’ve recommended a new newsletter.) If you’ve got friends who are also writing on Substack, you may be able to do a bit of cross-promotion to grow both of your lists— you recommend their newsletter, and they recommend yours.
• They’ve added lots of new features for anyone who regularly publishes original audio or video — If you’re publishing both a newsletter and a podcast — via audio and/or video — Substack might be a good option for you. You can easily publish your podcast directly via the platform, and even choose to put part (or all) or the podcast behind a paywall for paying subscribers. Plus, they’ve added an AI tool to transcribe your podcast into text for readers who’d rather read than listen to or watch your podcast.
• They continue to roll out more advanced features for publishers — Substack’s made a big push to be more like a publishing tool, not just a newsletter platform. Among the features they’ve rolled out: You can now set up different newsletters (like a daily newsletter and a weekly newsletter) under a single publication. You can set up free trials for new subscribers, and decide how long that trial should last (a week? a month?) or if it should only be available for specific types of users, like readers with a .edu email address. If you choose, you can automatically move older posts behind your paywall (after a period of time that you determine), and they’ve rolled out features to sell group subscriptions. If you want to offer a lead magnet, like a .pdf or an ebook, you can embed that into a newsletter. They’ve added a chat feature into their app, where readers can engage directly with the writers behind a newsletter, and launched Notes, a social media platform that feels a lot like the app formerly known Twitter.
• You can let Substack do all your paid subscription marketing for you — Substack offers a tool to all users, called Boost, where they’ll run your subscription marketing efforts for you. With Boost, Substack sends free trials or other special offers to your non-paying audience on your behalf, at moments when they think readers will be most likely to engage. It all happens automatically — you don’t have to do anything.
• You can set up different tiers for subscription payments — If you want to offer both a basic subscription offer and a more premium offer, you can do so using the Founding Member tier, and then choose where you want to price that and what additional benefits, if any, they’d receive.
• If you’re not ready to turn on a paid subscription, you can still start to build your subscription audience — Let’s say you’re interested in turning on a paid subscription offering, but not until you know that it’ll bring in at least $1,000 per month. Substack offers a pretty unique feature for you: You can use their Pledge feature to ask readers to commit to supporting your newsletter in the future. If they do so, Substack will collect their credit card information, but won’t charge them until you turn subscriptions on — which can happen whenever you feel like you’ve built enough of a subscription base.
• Newsletter polling is built into the platform — Have a quick question for readers? Want them to take a quiz? You can do either within a newsletter, allowing readers to vote or reply with a single click. 

What doesn’t Substack do?

Substack was built to be an all-in-one tool — they handle all of the tech for you. But that also means that Substack is a closed system. Aside from Stripe, there are no outside integrations, and there’s no public API. You can’t use a tool like SparkLoop to recommend newsletters on other platforms, or use Zapier to integrate with a survey tool like SurveyMonkey or Google Forms. For some writers, Substack can feel a little bit limited.

If you have a standalone website and want to convert readers to your newsletter, you could manually embed Substack’s sign-up boxes on your site, but you can’t use a pop-up tool like OptinMonster to collect email sign-ups and automatically add them to your list.

Here’s one other example: Substack offers just a handful of design tweaks you can make to your site and newsletter. They do offer a few basic homepage template options, and you can choose a background and an accent color, as well as fonts for headlines and body text. But that’s it — you can’t add in custom CSS or HTML. On Substack, your newsletter looks like everyone else’s.

Substack doesn’t offer any built-in ad network, and in public appearances and on podcasts, their leadership team has repeatedly said that they have no plans to build that into the platform. (Many Substack writers do sell native ads themselves, and then manually place those ads into their newsletters. Since they don’t help you sell ads, Substack does not take a percentage of any ad revenue.) Substack payments are also limited to subscriptions or memberships — you can’t accept donations through their tool, or sell merchandise, or courses.

Substack does allow you to set up a single welcome email, and they do send some transactional messages (like a reminder to renew your subscription), which you can edit. But it doesn’t offer customizable automations like many of the other tools on this list.

There’s no A/B testing tool built into the platform. (There are ways to manually split your list to run basic tests, but it will require some work on your end.)

Like many of the other tools in this guide, Substack doesn’t maintain its own sending domain. (Emails are sent via Mailgun.) But unlike the others in this guide, Substack doesn’t provide any public details about how they keep emails in the inbox. There’s not even a page in their help center about it. Over the years, I’ve talked with hundreds of writers on Substack, and none have reported significant deliverability issues, but the lack of transparency about deliverability does stand out among the options listed in this guide.

Substack does offer some support for users via email or a chat feature on their site. They do not offer phone support.

What does Substack cost?

Substack doesn’t charge any monthly fees to use the platform. You can send as many newsletters out as you want, forever, and for free.

If you just want an easy place to write and send emails, and your goals aren’t tied to monetization, that makes Substack a fantastic option. You won’t pay anything, even as your audience grows.

But if you’re monetizing through a subscription, there’s both reward — and risk — with using Substack.

Four of the other ESP options I’ve listed in this guide offer a native payment tool similar to Substack’s. Two do not take any cut of your revenue. Two take 0.6% of revenue. 

Substack takes 10 percent — plus Stripe’s 2.9% + $.30 cut.

When you’re just launching a subscription product, that 10 percent isn’t a big deal. In most cases, it’s a bargain, since you’re still not paying to send out newsletters.

But as your paid subscriber base grows, your monthly cut to Substack grows with it. When your subscription revenues hit $25,000, or $50,000, or $100,000, you may start asking: Is it still worth it to stay on Substack, or should I move elsewhere? Could I get a set of features similar to Substack’s and save some money?

Over the years, I’ve talked with many successful indie newsletter operators on Substack about this dilemma. Some choose to leave — it’s fairly easy to do so, since Stripe handles the payments, and you can export your list of email subscribers at any time.

But many choose to stay on the platform, even as the fees to Substack grow. Several prominent newsletters have left the platform but then returned to Substack. Why? Many of the writers I’ve talked to say it’s because they really like Substack’s ease-of-use and features, and don’t mind paying a little more for a tool that lets them focus on creating content — while Substack handles the rest.

All six tools, at a glance…

What’s next?

Let’s talk about newsletter business models or steps to get your newsletter off the ground.

The Five Types of Indie Newsletter Business Models

How to Launch Your Indie Newsletter

How to Write and Promote Your First Newsletter

How to Get Your First 5,000 Readers and Engage With Your Audience

How to Start Monetizing Your Indie Newsletter