All I really want from Substack is an all-you-can-eat model where I pay a base fee and they sort out who gets what based on what I read. It can’t be that hard, lynda.com did it ages ago and was always profitable.
This is the reason I never paid for any substack subscription.
There are about 15 authors I'm willing to support in some way, but not $5/month for any of them individually. I don't even mind if they kept some articles restricted. It could be that I can "unlock" 10 premium articles per month for $10/mon, the main thing is I want to control what I contribute. $75/mon is too much.
This is the issue from the consumer point of view. For most people, it's too expensive to subscribe to more than a few (like less than 5) writers on Substack, and that excludes the newsletters that have the really high-expertised content (which tend to be quite expensive on a standalone basis, as one would expect). This makes sense for the writers, but as a consumer, it's very limited. I personally only read a few Substacks because I don't want to spend the money to subscribe to more than a few of them, given other subscription costs already being incurred elsewhere. No doubt many other potential readers are in a similar position.
> want from Substack is an all-you-can-eat model where I pay a base fee and they sort out who gets what based on what I read
This doesn’t work for high-cost content. Ultimately, if a writer can’t find readers who find their work worth the friction of paying for it, I’m not sure they’re adding value going solo.
There are about 15 authors I'm willing to support in some way, but not $5/month for any of them individually. I don't even mind if they kept some articles restricted. It could be that I can "unlock" 10 premium articles per month for $10/mon, the main thing is I want to control what I contribute. $75/mon is too much.