Open source alternatives to Substack

What Substack does

Substack is a subscription publishing platform. Writers, podcasters and video creators publish posts that appear on a web publication and arrive in subscribers’ inboxes, and they choose which posts are free and which are reserved for paying subscribers. Substack handles payments and subscriber management, hosts podcasts and live video, and offers subscriber chat and comments. A reader app, recommendations between publications and the Notes feed help publications find new readers inside Substack’s own network. Writers can import mailing lists and archives from services such as Mailchimp, Ghost, WordPress and Medium.

Why people look for an alternative

• Revenue share. Substack is free to start and charges no platform fee, but it keeps a percentage of paid subscription revenue, and card processing fees come on top. For a large paid publication, a fixed software or hosting cost can be lower.
• Content license and moderation. Under Substack’s terms of service, publishing grants Substack a royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable and worldwide license to your posts. Ownership is not affected, but Substack also reserves the right to remove content at its discretion.
• Dependence on one platform. Much of the growth Substack advertises comes from its own app and network. Writers who prefer to build their audience on their own domain, with their own payment account and code they can run themselves, need a different platform.

What to compare in an alternative

1. Paid subscriptions. Free and paid tiers, monthly and yearly prices, offers, and whether payments go to your own Stripe account without a platform fee.
2. Website and archive. A public site with your posts, themes and your own domain.
3. Migration. An importer for Substack posts and subscribers, and whether paying subscribers keep their subscriptions after the move.
4. Email sending. Which provider sends the newsletter and what it costs at your list size.
5. Hosting. Whether you will run the server yourself or use a managed service from the developers.

Which one to choose

Ghost is the open source alternative to Substack. It combines a website, an editor, member accounts, several newsletters per site and free and paid tiers billed through your own Stripe account, and Ghost says it takes no transaction fee on subscriptions. Ghost Admin includes a Substack migrator for posts and members, and paid subscribers can carry on when you connect the same Stripe account that your Substack publication used. You can self-host it with Node.js and MySQL, in which case newsletters are sent through Mailgun, or use Ghost(Pro), the managed service of the non-profit Ghost Foundation. What you give up is Substack’s built-in discovery network, so plan how you will keep growing your list.

If you do not need paid subscriptions and only want to send a newsletter to your list, simpler tools such as listmonk or Keila are also an option. Neither runs a website for your posts, although listmonk can publish a public archive of past campaigns.