Why Writers Rarely Leave Substack
Justin Gage, founder of Technically, on how Substack earns its 10% take rate
Substack’s strongest moat is that competitors mostly improve the spreadsheet around a newsletter business, not the core act of publishing and keeping the archive, audience, and discovery loop intact. For a writer, switching means exporting subscribers and posts, figuring out whether Stripe subscriptions carry over cleanly, rebuilding workflows in a new UI, and risking broken search traffic and split signups across two homes. That makes better analytics or ads feel incremental, not decisive.
-
The practical migration work is messy. Justin Gage describes testing other platforms directly, exporting Substack data, checking import tools, sorting out Stripe subscription transfer, and deciding what to do with old posts that still rank in search. If those URLs cannot redirect, years of links and SEO equity can break.
-
Beehiiv and Kit compete by adding monetization and operator tools, not by reinventing the product. Beehiiv built around ads plus SaaS, and by 2025 roughly a third of its revenue came from ads. Kit stayed closer to email software with SaaS pricing. Those are meaningful differences for power users, but they do not automatically justify the switching cost for most writers.
-
Substack has responded by narrowing the feature gap instead of relying only on brand. Research from 2024 and 2025 shows it moving toward ads and a broader discovery feed, while its scale reached an estimated $45M annualized revenue on about $450M GMV and 5M paid subscriptions. That scale reinforces the sense that staying put is the default choice.
The next phase is less about mass creator exits and more about platform convergence. Beehiiv and Kit will keep layering in ad networks, automation, and business tooling, while Substack keeps adding monetization and discovery features to preserve its default status. Migration pressure will rise first among top earners, but broad writer behavior will likely remain sticky until a rival offers a clearly superior bundle, not just cheaper software.