Substack pricing, price hikes and cheaper alternatives
Substack (substack.com) is a newsletter platform. Free to publish, 10% of paid-subscription revenue. Free plan: unlimited subscribers.
What Substack costs
- 1k subscribers: free
- 5k subscribers: free
- 10k subscribers: free
- 25k subscribers: free
- 50k subscribers: free
- 100k subscribers: free
Plan compared: No plan fee. Cheapest paid plan that can send a weekly newsletter to the whole list, billed monthly. Plans priced by emails sent assume one issue a week, about 4.3 emails per subscriber a month.
Substack price hikes
No price hikes on record for Substack.
Alternatives to Substack
Other newsletter platforms at 10k subs:
- Sendy + SES: $4.30/mo
- MailCheap: $39/mo
- Flodesk: $72/mo
- Buttondown: $79/mo
- Bento: $79/mo
- MailerLite: $89/mo
- Ghost(Pro): $105/mo
- Mailchimp: $110/mo
- beehiiv: $139/mo
- Kit: $139/mo
Substack alternatives: 10 newsletter platforms compared, at every size.
Sources
Pricing page: substack.com. Prices last checked Oct 16, 2026. Free to send. The real cost is 10% of paid-subscription revenue plus Stripe fees, which together can reach about 13–14%.