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by Angostura 2185 days ago
% fees are very attractive to people who are starting small or experimental and have no real idea as to whether the idea will take off.

It’s and automated, easy to understand freemium model.

1 comments

That's the catch. It's easy to start and experiment. But as you grow bigger you start realizing it's a bad deal so may start looking for alternatives. That's bad for Substack since why would you like your most successful users to be unhappy? A better model IMHO would be a fixed tiered price based on the number of subscribers you have, similarly to how most email providers' business model work. For most users it wouldn't be cheaper than 10%, but for the top X of users it would. Having a fixed cost you can plan in advance for is more attractive IMHO.
you say this but there are dozens of people running million+ dollar substacks with no plans to leave. this market is huge, writers really don't like to futz around with tech as much as we do