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A lot of hate for Substack, probably because of how fucked up Medium became. But honestly, the Substack model is much nicer: 1) you arent charged if youre a writer, de facto. 2) yes, they provide stuff that costs money if you want to use them (custom subdomains cost a one time fixed cost of $50) 3) you, as a content creator, can choose if you want to enable monetization, at which point the readers must pay to read your content, but still - you arent explicitly charged to post stuff (which is what happens in the Medium model, implicitly). one thing Substack should do is enable webhooks so that if you are running a webapp and you want to give your paid subscribers access to an 'exclusive blog', you can tell substack that user X with email addr Y is a paid subscriber to MyService ABC, and then instead of requiring payments to Substack, it would just let them through. Not sure how the user/unit economics would work here, but I enabled a Substack blog for a new SaaS I'm building, and I want to make it pay-only, but I'm already using Stripe to handle subscriptions/payments and I don't want my users to have to pay twice in order to see the blog (while already paying for the APIs and services provided by the site.) and also use the service web app as well as the service web API. @cjbest, @sethbannon, @pg if youre listening I think this would be a good thing to prioritize: webhook to allow subscribers for X's SaaS/startup/whatever to be implicitly include in the set of "paying Substack users" instead of requiring some app's user to pay a second time (for some non-egregious fee, maybe a small percentage of the user subsription fee for X's pricing model. Maybe even Stripe & Substack could chat about a bidirectional integration to make this seamless, and even bake in some of the costs). if you like these ideas you should totally reach me at the addresses listed on my keybase on my profile, I am super awesome and its 4:24am EST (my location) so clearly I'm motivated. Cheers |