Substack vs. Ghost for a paid newsletter

When people decide where to put their writing, two names come up: Substack and Medium. Both hand you an audience. Both run on the same premise: you write, they own the relationship with your readers.

There's a third option that starts from the opposite premise. If you plan to charge for your work, it's worth understanding before you commit years to it. Here's the honest comparison between the platform most paid newsletters start on, Substack, and the one built on owning your audience instead, Ghost – including the part about money that never makes it onto a pricing page.

Short version, if you're deciding right now: Substack is free to start and takes 10% of your subscription revenue forever, plus Stripe's processing fees. A Ghost site costs a hosting fee that has nothing to do with what you earn, and 0% of your subscription revenue. You keep everything after Stripe. In practice that means Substack is cheaper until you have roughly 14 paid subscribers. Above that, Ghost wins by a growing margin, and you also own your domain, your list, and your archive outright. The rest of this piece walks through why that matters beyond the math.

What Substack and Medium actually give you

Before getting into where they fall short, it's worth being specific about what you're getting, because it's not nothing. Substack gives you a working publication in minutes: hosted newsletter, built-in payments, a reader app, and a discovery network of other writers' audiences. Medium gives you something similar for essays and articles, built around its own curation and paywall. Neither requires you to think about a server, a domain, or an email service provider. For someone testing whether they even like writing regularly, that's a legitimate reason to start there.

The trade-off shows up once you're not just testing anymore: once people are paying you and you're building something you intend to keep.

The network effect is real. That's exactly why it's a trap.

Give Substack its due. Notes, cross-recommendations from other writers, the reader app: they genuinely put you in front of people who've never heard of you. Medium does the same through its own distribution. This is the main reason both platforms win people starting out.

Now look at what you're building while it happens. Every reader that network sends you is a relationship the platform owns, not you. You can export a list of email addresses but you can't export the recommendations, the discovery, or the algorithm that brought them. Those only work while you stay.

That's the trap. Not that you can't leave, but that leaving costs you the thing that made the platform attractive in the first place. The discovery feels free. But you pay for it in dependency.

The 10% is just the visible cost

Substack takes 10% of your subscription revenue, on top of the payment processing Stripe charges wherever you host (roughly 2.9% + 30¢, plus a 0.5% recurring-billing fee). That 10% is Substack's, and it doesn't stop, discount, or cap as you grow.

Ghost – and any managed hosting provider running it for you – takes nothing from your revenue. You connect your own Stripe account and, after Stripe's cut, keep 100%. Instead of a percentage, you pay for the hosting. What you charge your readers never enters the calculation.

The clearest way to see it is to count subscribers instead of revenue, because that's the number you actually know about yourself. So: say each paid subscriber pays you €8 a month, they make up your whole list, and you send a weekly newsletter — four sends in a typical month. Stripe's cut applies on every platform, so it's left out of all three columns, and each provider is shown in the currency it actually bills in.

The break-even is about 14 paid subscribers. At €8 a month, fourteen subscribers generate roughly €11 a month in Substack fees, which is what a year of Magic Pages costs per month. Charge €15 and it happens at seven subscribers. Charge €5 and it takes twenty-two. Either way it arrives early, long before this feels like a real business.

After that, the two lines diverge permanently. At 500 paid subscribers you hand Substack €4,800 a year and Magic Pages €130.

What a hosting provider for Ghost actually charges for

Hosting isn't one fixed number forever, though, so it's worth knowing what moves it. It doesn't move with your revenue. It moves with how much you use it. The easiest way to show that is with a full example.

Say you have 6,000 subscribers. Five hundred of them pay €8 a month, and the other 5,500 read for free. You send four newsletters a month. That gives you €4,000 a month in subscription revenue, and 24,000 emails to send. Here is what each platform charges for that same publication.

Same publication, three very different bills. The reason Magic Pages costs €235 a year rather than €130 is the free list: 6,000 subscribers times four newsletters is 24,000 emails, which is 14,000 over the 10,000 included, adding €8.78 a month. The 500 people actually paying you barely register – on their own they would be 2,000 emails a month, comfortably inside the allowance.

On most hosting provider for Ghost, your bill follows how big your audience is and how often you email it, not how much you earn from it. Substack is the reverse: it doesn't care whether your list is 500 people or 50,000, only what you charge them.

Which means the two models genuinely suit different publications. A large free list earning modest revenue can be cheaper on Substack. A smaller list that pays well is dramatically cheaper on Ghost. And because email volume is the thing that moves the Magic Pages number, it is worth seeing how it grows as your list and your publishing schedule do:

Ghost(Pro) moves on a different axis again. It never charges for email, no matter how often you send, but every subscriber counts toward the member total that sets your price – free readers included. Its Publisher plan moves in tiers: billed yearly, that is $29 a month for up to 1,000 members, $63 up to 5,000, $79 up to 7,500, $88 up to 10,000 and $141 up to 25,000. A 6,000-person list sits on the 7,500 tier, which is where the figure above comes from.

Feature by feature

Fees are only part of the decision. Here's how the two platforms actually compare on the things that shape day-to-day publishing:

The pattern across almost every row is the same one from the fee comparison: Substack optimizes for zero setup and borrowed reach. Ghost optimizes for control you keep, at the cost of setting more of it up yourself — which is exactly what a Ghost host like Magic Pages exists to remove.

What owning your audience actually gets you

On Ghost, the entire publication is yours: your domain, your Stripe account, your subscriber list, your content. It's all exportable and portable. Ghost is open source, so even the software itself can't be taken away from you. If your hosting provider ever changed terms or shut down, you could move the whole thing elsewhere and keep every reader.

You build on ground you own, so nobody else's decision can undo your work.

Ghost also publishes a real, indexable website. Every post you write keeps working long after you hit publish. It will show up in search results, pulling in new readers who never saw your newsletter go out. That's discovery you own, compounding over years, instead of discovery you rent.

That also means that there is no algorithm in between. What you send is what your readers get. Nothing decides to show your post to a fraction of your list to encourage you to boost it, and nothing buries an email because engagement dipped.

What Substack does better

An honest comparison cuts both ways. So let's be fair.

Substack is entirely free until you turn on paid subscriptions, so there's no upfront cost to test whether people will pay for your writing. The built-in discovery network is real distribution that a brand-new Ghost site simply doesn't have on day one.

If you're not sure yet whether you want to write regularly, or whether anyone will pay for it, that's a reasonable set of trade-offs to accept temporarily.

The honest catch with Ghost

Someone has to run it. Ghost is software, not a service. Self-host it yourself and you're now responsible for servers, updates, email deliverability, and backups. Email deliverability in particular is unforgiving: get it wrong and your posts land in spam instead of inboxes, and readers rarely tell you when that happens. That's genuine, ongoing work, and it's the honest reason plenty of people stay on the easier option even after they know the trade-offs.

The real cost of self-hosting Ghost in 2026

Self-hosting Ghost looks like $5/month. The honest 2026 total − after the Mailgun price hike, a server that won’t crash, and your time − is a different number. Here’s the full overview, and who should still do it.

Magic PagesJannis Fedoruk-Betschki

That's the part a managed host removes. Magic Pages – and many others – run the Ghost site for you. That includes updates, deliverability, backups, security, and the server itself, so you get everything above without touching infrastructure. You write; we keep the lights on.

Moving from Substack to Ghost

If you already have paying subscribers on Substack, migrating doesn't mean starting over – and it doesn't require the from-scratch rebuild some horror stories suggest. The general path:

1. Export your content from Substack, then run it through Ghost's built-in Substack migrator (Settings → Migration tools in any Ghost admin, including Magic Pages). This matters more than it sounds: Substack's raw export doesn't include your images, so if you just import the HTML directly, every post ends up hotlinking back to Substack – and those images break the moment your Substack goes offline. The migrator tool pulls the media across properly and rewrites internal links so your archive actually works standalone.
2. Export your subscriber list as CSV and import it into Ghost. Free and paid status carry over.
3. Connect the same Stripe account you were using on Substack. Because Substack subscriptions run on Stripe under the hood, your subscribers' cards stay on file and billing continues without asking anyone to re-enter payment details – this is the one part of the whole process that tends to just work.
4. Deal with Substack's ongoing fee. Ghost doesn't take a cut of your revenue, but Substack will keep taking its 10% on subscriptions that started there, even after you've migrated, until that fee connection is explicitly removed – it doesn't happen on its own. Molly White ran into this directly: she had to email Substack support and ask them, specifically, to disconnect the fee from the Stripe account, and initially got a reply suggesting this wasn't possible before a second, more informed reply confirmed it was – and did it. Whatever you do, don't use Substack's self-service "disconnect Stripe" option for this. That cancels and refunds every paid subscription instead of just removing the fee.
5. Point your domain at the new site, or set one up if you were publishing on a Substack subdomain – Substack doesn't let you take their subdomain with you.
6. Send a note to your list letting them know where you've moved.

Where to start

If you just want to find out whether you enjoy writing, use anything – a free platform, a notebook, it barely matters. But the day this becomes something you charge for and intend to build on, start where you mean to stay. Every subscriber you gather on rented land is one you'll eventually have to move, and later always costs more than now. More subscribers to re-verify, more history to migrate, more inertia to overcome.

So, my (biased) advice: own it from the start.

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