Lack of Subscriber Filtering Tools
Justin Gage, founder of Technically, on how Substack earns its 10% take rate
This is the clearest place where Substack’s product philosophy shows up as a business tradeoff. The product is built to make publishing and paid subscriptions simple, but that simplicity historically came at the cost of the kind of audience segmentation and workflow tools that let an operator treat a newsletter like a real CRM. That matters because once a publication gets large, growth depends less on writing the next post and more on being able to identify who is drifting, who is engaged, and who should get a specific message next.
-
ConvertKit’s pitch has long been that creators need automations, integrations, and a unified customer view, not just a send button. In practice that means tagging people based on behavior, routing them into welcome or upsell sequences, and combining purchase data from tools like Shopify, Teachable, and Stripe into one dashboard.
-
Substack has since added filtering and targeted email tools, including the ability to segment subscribers by things like paid status, comment activity, section subscription, and recent email opens. That shows the product moving toward CRM behavior, but from a lightweight publisher dashboard rather than a deep marketing automation system.
-
The competitive line in newsletters is not just take rate versus SaaS pricing. It is closed network versus open stack. Substack keeps more activity inside its own ecosystem, while ConvertKit built around 180 plus integrations and Beehiiv positioned itself between publishing software and revenue tooling, which changes how much control a creator has over audience data and follow up.
The next phase of newsletter software is a shift from publishing tools to audience operating systems. Substack is already filling in segmentation and direct messaging, but the bigger winner will be the platform that lets creators move from one to many broadcasting into behavior based lifecycle marketing, without forcing them to leave the product or stitch together five other tools.