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

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

Molly White

@screwturn Scroll down for a chart comparing pricing for newsletters of all sizes.

Jerome (He/Him)

@molly0xfff @usul Is this true even with tools like Sendy that uses Amazon SES?

Molly White

@jeromechoo @usul I consider those to fall into the same category of services where you pay someone to do mailsending for you