“I can’t leave Substack, the alternatives charge monthly fees!”

Doctor Popular

@molly0xfff thanks for sharing these details.

Keith Harrison :clubtwit:

@molly0xfff Isn’t ConvertKit only free up to 1,000? Pricing similar to mailchimp.

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@molly0xfff Not matter how easy it is, I think a lot of people just wouldn't bother.

Molly White

@Methylcobalamin it’s not a question of whether they’d bother, there’s no effort required by the subscriber

Molly White

@kharrison no, it’s 10k now

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@molly0xfff Why do you think people who can easily afford those new platform fees haven't been migrating?

Molly White

@Methylcobalamin It’s scary to shake things up if it’s your income, and there is certainly non-zero effort on the writer’s end in moving. Plus Substack really likes to talk up its network effects, to try to instill concern that people will see their growth flatline if they leave.

huxley(fur)

@molly0xfff stupid question, but isn't that cost offset by payment for the subs? if I have 20000 subs how much is that bringing in? (if self-hosting, I assume 20000 "subs" is no income at all)

Molly White

@huxley yes, it would be offset in most cases.

Jarek Kopeć

@molly0xfff How do these platform compare when it comes to owners control of the user data? Is it easy to migrate between platforms?

Molly White

@jarekkopec Substack has always boasted of portability, but they seem to be rapidly building walls with things like their “follow” feature. Ghost is excellent. Not personally super familiar with the others.

Saxnot 🚀#38C3:☎️7296

@molly0xfff a newsletter is just a mailing list with only admins being able to send, right?
mailing lists are free

Molly White

@saxnot mailing lists may be free but successfully doing bulk mailsending very much is not

jeremiah

@molly0xfff substack costs $700/month?! God damn. I thought it was more they were providing a solid enough product at VC subsidy prices.

d2718

@molly0xfff This is the most impressive piece of alt-text I have ever seen.

Molly White

@jeremiah they hide the price because it’s not an up-front flat fee (like most of its competitors), but a cut of subscription revenue

truh

@kenny113 @molly0xfff @usul I'd guess that the problem is more that you loose a lot of your readers if RSS is the only form of subscription you offer.

Feed token seems good enough for that purpose. Most probably also work with basic auth but I'm not sure that's really better in any way.

Kenny

@truh @molly0xfff @usul strange how many replies I get from people I didn’t ask on mastodon. but since we’re here…
certainly there are two sides to that coin. likewise, there are consumers who would be interested in subscribing but would never pay to get more email either. paid email newsletters don’t make a lot of sense to a lot of people. and clearly there are huge distribution issues with email (as we’re discussing here) which can be overcome with different distribution channels. For example, @404mediaco offers a public RSS feed for all articles, but you simply can’t read full articles for members-only content. I would be interested to hear from someone who offers subscription content about why they chose the distribution channel they chose and if they see any “universal solutions” on the horizon.

Molly White

@kenny113 @truh Feel free to ignore if this isn’t helpful, but I’m a pretty heavy RSS user who also prefers to read newsletters in my feed reader and not in my inbox.

404 Media actually has built out something like authenticated RSS: https://www.404media.co/404-media-now-has-a-full-text-rss-feed/ I’m a paid subscriber to 404 and I just turn off all emails and use the feed. Works great.

I also subscribe to a lot of newsletters via RSS. For paid ones, I usually pay, turn off emails, and add the feed to my feedreader.

Humphrey Archer

@molly0xfff
This made me laugh

I have 31 subscribers to my newsletter, and the notion of having 20,000 sounds so unlikely that it is funny.

Thanks