Substack's Pricing Model is Fine, Actually

I don't think paying $1 per article is a good idea (but this article is free.)

It seems like I can’t log into Substack without seeing the same complaint over and over again: that the subscription pricing model is flawed, and should be replaced or complemented by something else. Typically, people are arguing that they should be able to pay per article—ideally something like $1 (because of course.) This would enable them to only read what they want to read, and not be beholden to subscription fees for too many writers. Others, typically writers themselves, take a sacrificing stance and say that it’s selfish for any writer to paywall at all, and we should simply operate like subway buskers asking for tips (no, really, they literally want us to ask for tips.)

Only one problem with this: it would be catastrophic for Substack’s revenue, and for the revenue of many Substack writers. Arguably, it might also make the entire experience worse for readers, even if they like the change at first.

I understand the logic behind wanting a curated feed of writing that you can enjoy, and never anything you don’t. I understand liking a lot of writers and not being able to subscribe to all of them. But nothing is perfect, and Substack has already been a major game-changer when it comes to making a living as a writer, or discovering new voices. I read Substack more than I read all legacy media combined.

As someone who has been a full-time Substack writer for about six months now, I can confidently say that if Substack operated on a $1-per-article basis (or even a $5-per-article basis, or splitting up a general Substack budget among publications) I would still be working as a subpar product manager on my sixth PIP. While I understand the relative convenience of paying per article, really what’s being said is, “I just want things to cost less.” Get in line, buddy! I want a Hermes bag for $150—wait, why even $150? Why not $4? And I want my burrito’s private taxi to be free. But for some reason, people who sell products aren’t in the business of making their products cheaper with no upside.

You might be thinking that there is an upside. There’s a popular argument that burgeoning writers would make more money if we could pay per article, because right now they make no money at all if people would prefer to subscribe to more established publications. It’s true that perhaps smaller publications with $0 in revenue would make a little more money if they could charge by the article, but I think this strategy would actually screw over the less established publications over time. How do I know this? Because only a year ago, that was me!

A year ago, I was not doing this full time. I was writing, but I was basically just a Twitter troll who started a Substack account under an anonymous name, not an established writer with bylines in major publications. I initially started this Substack as a hobby, maybe a side hustle (I wrote about my Substack origin story here.) Anyway, while I’m hardly the most successful person on Substack, I am now a humor bestseller, so clearly something went right for me. But if people had the option to pay $1 per article, I never would have made any real money on here (certainly not enough to quit my job.)

Part of the reason that my Substack became successful was that people took a chance on me. They read an article they thought was cool, and instead of buying just that article and bouncing, they subscribed. Granted, some people immediately unsubscribed after using their free trial to read one article. Many such cases! But if they had even had the option to pay per article, almost all of them would have taken it. Why would you ever subscribe to someone you’ve never heard of for $50 a year, when you have the option to throw them $1 and read their only article you’ve seen so far? Arguably, the only writers who would benefit under this dual strategy would be the names who are already huge—people who don’t really need the help. (When I started paying for Slow Boring, I did it because I was already very familiar with it, not because I read half of one article and wanted to finish it.)

The subscription model carries benefits for the reader too. Not to toot my own horn too much, but I’ve had a lot of subscribers say things like “I’m single and don’t have kids, and I subscribed just to read your article on sunk cost boyfriends, but then I started reading your stuff about parenting, which I didn’t expect to enjoy.” I’ve had men in their fifties and sixties say they enjoy reading my stuff on female fashion, even though they’ve never thought about it before. I’ve had grandparents tell me they subscribed for something related to culture or family, but wound up discovering what “serving cunt” meant. I write about a lot of different topics (mostly related to social dynamics) and there are many articles of mine which people probably wouldn’t have paid $1 to read because they assumed the content wasn’t for them, but paid subscribers read these articles anyway because they were already paying. And many of them are glad they did (subscribers, please back me up here so I don’t look like a jackass.)

There’s also the component of community. If you are a full-time Substack writer, you develop relationships with your paid subscribers (at least the active ones.) I have a few subscribers who I actually think about when I write, because they faithfully comment (not always agreeing, but always respectful!) within a few hours of publication. I chat with these people on the paid-subscriber chat. The founding members have access to the Discord where we share funny tweets and even share more in-depth personal issues and provide advice on things like parenting, dating, and work. I’m starting a personals column for paid subscribers to meet romantic partners (which should launch later this week.) I have a strong feeling that none of those people who benefit from this tight-knit, compassionate community would have made it here if they had the option to pay me $1 to read my article about Reddit’s prettiest vaginas.

People have also complained that the Substack pricing model incentivizes “slop.” I disagree but I do concede that Substack incentivizes two things:

1. Writing prolifically

2. Writing things that lots of people want to read

The problem with highbrow writers who believe the subscription system is stacked against them because everyone is just too dumb is that very few of them do these two things, especially the former thing. Some writers like to think of themselves as writers, but don’t actually like writing, and that’s a problem for making money. A subscription model absolutely incentivizes prolific writing—this is partially why people like

Matthew Yglesias

and

Noah Smith

are so successful (although they’re also just good writers.) Those are obviously extreme cases—arguably the 0.1% of Substack—but there are plenty of other writers, ones with orange checks instead of purple (my people!) who still found their success by writing frequently. Examples:

Jeff Maurer

, Freddie deBoer,

Bess Kalb

, or

Katie Gatti Tassin

. I don’t know what any of these people’s specific financial situations are, but I would bet they are making a lot more money on Substack than they’d be making without it.

If you don’t like to write, you aren’t going to become a professional Substack writer. If writing is something you can only bring yourself to do on an every-other-week basis, you can certainly use Substack as a hobby, but I wouldn’t expect to make any money that way. A change in the pricing structure that would wreck all the prolific authors who do this full-time would also not make things much better for a twice-a-month writer. It would just be like Trump’s economic plan: less money for everyone.

Now, point two. I saw an article recently (I don’t want to link to it because I’m about to be a little mean) that decried Substack incentivizing social-media-tier midwittery disguised as erudite. Ironically, the article itself was intensely wordy, floral, and read like the angry ramblings of a college freshman majoring in comparative literature. But let’s give this writer the benefit of the doubt. Maybe he’s extremely smart, and maybe the rest of us are social media addled dullards, ejaculating pointless drivel on each other in a giant slop bukkake. Ultimately, if your esoteric writing only appeals to extremely intellectual and well-read people, it does not have mass appeal, and would not make much money under any system. Maybe I’m just stupid, but it seems pretty simple that “things most people want to buy” tend to sell better than “things only 2% of people are smart enough to understand.” By all means—write your ultra-literary, ultra-intellectual stuff. There is a market for that! But it’s a smaller market, and that’s not the fault of Substack or anyone else.

Moreover, having everyone pay $1 per article (which to that author’s credit, wasn’t his suggestion—he was mostly just complaining about Substack as an idea) would incentivize some of the worst writing you can imagine. I roll my eyes a little when I see some all-lowercase clickbait article just titled, “fuck” or “pussy slut” or something, but I can tell you with certainty that a Substack economy that relied on one-time payments would be driven primarily by the most pseudo-shocking, pointless stuff that existed only to push people past a single paywall. Forget about insightful or meaningful content—your entire feed would be “I Fucked My Kid’s Teacher,” and then the post-paywall reveal would be that their kid’s teacher is their wonderful wife who also homeschools. Say what you want about subscriber fees, but they force writers to bring something to the table other than shocking people one time. I regularly have to worry about attrition (I lose at least 10 paid subscribers with every article I write—often more) and this keeps me in check. Yes, sometimes I write something that might be a bit clickbaity, but ultimately my subscribers punish me for it by unsubscribing as soon as they realize the substance isn’t there.

Moving past the obvious fact that people just want everything to be free or low-cost without any consideration to the labor it takes to produce things, I think two major thematic elements are at play. I’ll start with the first one: the absolutely fucked literary industry. The nature of the literary industry is pushing writers toward Substack who are actually better suited for writing books. I think the best novel writers are probably not the best Substack writers, and vice versa. I would know—I’m a failed novelist. People who are good at writing books (novels, especially) tend to be very patient, but also don’t mind the drudgery that goes along with perfectionism. They don’t mind spending multiple months on one chapter. They don’t mind spending a year editing. But given how slow the literary industry works (assuming your agent ever responds to your emails, which is a major if) even the best novelist will find it very hard to make good money. When I was publishing my novel (under my real name, 7 years ago) my publisher connected me with some NYT bestseller authors and I was dismayed to discover that most of them were also working as teachers, not jetting around the world like Oprah. Books make almost no money, and if you’re one of the lucky few who even gets professionally published, it takes over a year to actually get your book into stores (not including all the time you spent writing it.) Then, very few people buy books, even if they’re good. It’s completely unsustainable for full-time work.

Because the literary industry is slow and crowded, I wouldn’t be surprised if a lot of those writers thought Substack would be a better platform than traditional publishing. And given how difficult traditional publishing is, I actually think Substack is the better platform, for basically anyone. But ultimately, people who are best at meticulously crafted, literary long-form content are probably not going to be super successful on Substack, no matter what the pricing model is. (Personally, I would love to see the option to publish books within Substack, similar to Amazon. I actually think that would be a great option for some of these writers, but I still think the subscription model makes sense for the most part. Also, we’d have to stop people from publishing articles as books and then charging people $1.)

I think less prolific writers on Substack—whether they are better suited for novels, or simply don’t have the time or resources to write every week or everyday—might benefit from banding together in co-publications. One example I can think of is

The Pomegranate

, which is run by five writers at once. Perhaps as a future enhancement, Substack should make it possibly to merge publications that already exist, and pool the funds. I imagine that’s way more complicated than I’m making it sound, but it makes more sense than cratering the company’s revenue so people can pay $1 per article.

The second issue at play is a bit more disturbing to me, which is that writing (or any art, really) is held to an impossibly pure moral standard, wherein we’re not supposed to want to make money, or we’re not supposed to accept any degree of unequal money distribution—you never see athletes talk about how they’re not going to take a salary because of all the former-D1 dads who never made pro. I noticed this a while back when some Substack writers started bragging about how they never paywalled anything because “art should always be free.” I mean…should it? I know we talk about how healthcare should be free, but even single-payer healthcare isn’t free because someone is still paying for it. Nothing is actually free! You just don’t want to be the one paying, and for some services, like healthcare, it makes sense to expect your government to provide it to some degree—but again, it’s still not free, and people who work in healthcare still make salaries. Writers who are able to make their art free aren’t doing anything noble—they still need to eat, and they usually just have a job doing something else. A while ago I wrote about people’s complaints when they discover an article is paywalled, but a paywall isn’t a sneaky trick employed by greedy goblins. If you’re a full-time Substack writer like I am, it’s literally just a salary. If I stopped paywalling everything, I would make no money. My freelance work makes about $1.5K per year, so yeah, money must be made. And I paywall fairly aggressively because my paid subscribers deserve good return on investment. (In case you’re wondering, I do 2 free articles per week, and 4 paid.)

When writers talk about how much more noble it is to simply request tips or donations, I can’t help but think their fetishization of the “starving artist” is really underselling themselves, and all writers. Without sounding like a massive asshole, I don’t think my work should always be free, because I think my work is worth paying for, and honestly, it’s probably worth more than what I charge. My paid subscribers get really good bang for buck, and many of them have told me so. I stand by my work, and even if I occasionally write something that isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, I’m confident that 20+ years of writing (even if most of it ended in failure!) has made me a writer whose work is worth something. You can’t expect people to take writers seriously as a profession and then relegate yourselves to virtual panhandling, or treat your work like goofy lanyards that nine-year-olds make for each other at camp.

So yes, I think Substack’s pricing model is fine. I may be slightly biased, as someone who benefits from it, but if anything that’s evidence that it’s not unfairly skewed toward big names. I wasn’t a big name when I got here, and arguably I still am not (I’m still waiting for the day I tell someone in real life that I am, in fact, CHH, and they don’t say, “Sorry, I don’t know what that is.”) If Substack was able to take me from failed tech worker and failed novelist to one of the top humor writers on the app, clearly they’re doing something right, and they’re not just padding the pockets of the biggest players in the game (who nevertheless deserve their success too.) So while nothing is perfect, and it can suck to have to pick and choose which writers you pay, I can’t think of any other app—or any other pricing model—that has made so many people full-time (or even successfully part-time) writers.