Sean Highkin, the creator of the NBA-focused publication The Rose Garden Report, tells The Verge that he makes “significantly more money” after switching from Substack to Ghost last April. “When I first joined up, [Substack] gave me a big push and featured me and funneled a lot of traffic to me, which led to a good amount of growth,” Highkin says. “But once I wasn’t one of the ‘new recruited talent’ they could tout, they stopped featuring me and I saw my growth stagnate.” Highkin now pays $2,052 per year using Ghost and an add-on called Outpost, compared to $4,968 per year on Substack. The Rose Garden Report’s subscriber base has grown 22 percent since the end of 2024, Highkin says. 
 It’s a similar story for creators switching to other platforms like Beehiiv. Matt Brown, the creator of Extra Points, which currently has 71,000 subscribers, moved away from Substack in 2021 and eventually landed on Beehiiv, where he saves thousands of dollars per year. “Given the size of my publication right now, I would need to pay Substack over $25,000 a year in fees,” Brown says. “I pay Beehiiv around $3,000-ish in fees.”

Source: Writers are fleeing the Substack Tax

Competition is good.

That’s because Substack owners can only export subscribers — not followers — when they leave the platform. Substack cofounder Hamish McKenzie pushes back on claims that the platform is a “walled garden,” saying “no walled garden would let you export your mailing list, content, and even payment relationships at any moment.” But he also admits that this portability doesn’t extend to followers, saying Notes “is a growth engine that helps you get subscribers, which you can then export.”

To Substack’s credit, from the get go, before they introduced “followers,” email subscribers were fully exportable. Substack itself faced the price of platform lock-in when twitter de-ranked external links. That led them to invest in Substack notes


Substack also invests heavily in building out its own discovery and recommendation features, and while that may help some creators build an audience, it adds more pressure to participate in writing tweet-style “Notes” to show up in a user’s algorithmic feed. Users who “follow” a writer through the Notes feature aren’t actually subscribing to their newsletter, either. This might benefit Substack’s engagement, but it’s only a plus for writers if they get a new subscriber out of it.

Any system that’s tied to a cut of revenue is motivated to chase the highest revenue and / or increase that take rate over time. As a venture funded startup in a world where their content is both increasingly clanker-slop and clanker-input, I am not bullish on substack, the place for “high-quality reading and writing.”

Platformer creator Casey Newton, who left Substack in 2024, says that while the publication is saving money on Ghost, “the more important thing is that we have a home on the open web that we control, and whatever anti-creator changes Substack is forced to make in the future to live up to its valuation we won’t be affected by.”

The indie-web itself is thriving. However, distribution challenges are very real. The solution is to understand why you are writing and how to set yourself up for success in your goals.

If your goal is massive distribution you have to leverage these platforms in someway. It’s not lost on me that every recently successful “writer” became successful in substack and then chose to export that base elsewhere.

The only exceptions are the old school web writers - like Ben Thomson who were very clear on who they were.