Substack Fee Calculator

What comes out of one paid subscription

Publishing on Substack costs nothing, and free subscribers cost nothing at any list size. The fees start when a reader pays, and three charges land on the same payment.

Only the first line is Substack's own revenue. The rest is the cost of collecting money, and a writer would pay most of it on any platform that runs cards through Stripe.

Substack's help page still describes the recurring billing charge as 0.5 percent, while Stripe's published Billing rate is 0.7 percent. The calculator lets you set the rate you see on your own payout statement, because the difference on an $8 subscription is about 2 cents a month.

Sources: Substack's explanation of paid subscriptions and Stripe's published pricing.

Worked example: an $8 monthly subscription

A reader pays $8 a month. Substack keeps 0.80. Stripe takes 2.9 percent of 8.00, which is 0.232, plus 0.30, for 0.53. Billing takes 0.7 percent, which is 0.056.

Fees: 0.80 + 0.53 + 0.06 = 1.39 dollars. You keep 8.00 - 1.39 = 6.61 dollars, about 83 percent of the price.

The 30 cents is the part that hurts small plans. It is identical on a $5 subscription and a $50 one, so on $5 it eats 6 percent of the price before any percentage fee applies.

Run the same math at $50 and the fixed fee falls to 0.6 percent of the price: 5.00 + 1.75 + 0.35 = 7.10 dollars of fees, leaving 42.90.

Every additional dollar of subscription price carries 13.6 cents of percentage fees (10 + 2.9 + 0.7) and no extra fixed fee, which is why the keep rate climbs with price and flattens near 86 percent.

Why a $5 plan keeps less than a $50 plan

The table below runs the same three fees at five price points. Rounding is to the cent, so a row may be a penny off a hand calculation.

At $100 a month the keep rate reaches 86.1 percent, and it never goes much past 86.4 percent because 13.6 percent of every payment is percentage based.

The practical reading: a low price is not automatically the safer bet. A $5 plan that converts twice as many readers can still earn less per subscriber than an $8 plan, and the fee structure is the reason.

Monthly versus annual: the 30 cents problem

The fixed 30 cents is charged per payment, not per dollar. An annual plan collects a year of money in one charge, so it pays that fixed fee once instead of twelve times.

At $8 a month, twelve payments bring in $96. Fees run 12 x 1.39 = 16.68 dollars, so you keep 96 - 16.68 = 79.32 dollars.

An $80 annual plan brings in less money but keeps a larger share: 8.00 + 2.62 + 0.56 = 11.18 dollars of fees, leaving 80 - 11.18 = 68.82 dollars, or 86.0 percent.

Per dollar collected, the annual plan keeps 86.0 percent against 82.7 percent for the monthly one. On the same $80 of revenue the difference is about 2.70 dollars, which is small per subscriber and adds up across hundreds of them.

Substack requires every publication to offer both a monthly and an annual plan, so the annual price is a lever you control. A discount of 15 to 20 percent against twelve monthly payments is the usual range.

The annual price that matches twelve $8 payments is about $92: 0.864 x 92.15 - 0.30 = 79.32 dollars. Price the annual plan at $80 and you give up about 10 dollars a year per subscriber in exchange for the money arriving in January instead of across twelve months.

One caveat on the whole comparison: the annual plan only wins if the reader would otherwise have stayed twelve months. A monthly subscriber who cancels after five months brings in 5 x 6.61 = 33.05 dollars, well under the 68.82 an annual subscriber pays up front.

What 500 paid subscribers bring in

500 subscribers at $8 a month is $4,000 of gross revenue each month.

Substack takes 400. Stripe takes 2.9 percent of 4,000, which is 116, plus 500 x 0.30 = 150, for 266. Billing takes 28. Total fees are 694, so you keep 3,306 dollars a month, or 39,672 a year.

The same 500 subscribers on an $80 annual plan bill $40,000 a year. Substack takes 4,000, Stripe takes 1,160 plus 150, billing takes 280, so fees total 5,590 and you keep 34,410.

Note what changed. Gross revenue fell by $8,000 because the annual plan is priced below twelve monthly payments, and net revenue fell by $5,262. The annual plan keeps a higher share of a smaller number, which is a good trade only if the lower price brings in readers who would not pay monthly at all.

Also note the shape of the cost. At $8 a month and 500 subscribers the total take is 17.4 percent: 13.6 percent in percentage fees plus 150 dollars of fixed card fees spread across 4,000 dollars of revenue.

The iOS cut, and other charges people miss

Subscriptions bought inside the Substack iOS app run through Apple's payment system. Apple takes 15 percent under its small business program and 30 percent above it, on top of Substack's and Stripe's cuts.

On an $8 subscription bought in the app at 15 percent: 8.00 - 0.80 - 0.53 - 0.06 - 1.20 = 5.41 dollars. At 30 percent: 8.00 - 0.80 - 0.53 - 0.06 - 2.40 = 4.21 dollars.

Other items that show up in a payout statement: refunds and chargebacks, which return the subscription price but usually leave the processing fee with Stripe; currency conversion for readers paying in euros or pounds, which adds about 2 percent on many Stripe accounts; and sales tax or VAT, which is collected from the reader and passed through rather than kept.

Founding member tiers are charged like any other subscription, so the 10 percent applies to the larger amount. A $150 a year founding tier nets about 129 dollars after the platform, card and billing fees.

What Substack does not charge for, and when that changes

Free posts, free subscribers and the publishing tools cost nothing at any list size. There is no monthly platform fee, no charge per email, and no charge for connecting a custom domain.

That structure suits a first paid product. At 10 paid subscribers on an $8 plan you keep about 66 dollars a month and you have paid nothing to find out whether the idea works.

It also means the fee scales with revenue in a way a flat monthly tool does not. Below roughly $290 a month of gross subscription revenue, a 10 percent cut costs less than a $29 flat fee; above that line the percentage is the more expensive shape.

Run both numbers before switching platforms. A flat fee looks cheaper at $1,000 a month of revenue and far more expensive at $100, and the break even point depends on your price and subscriber count rather than on the headline rate.