Finances
Authors can decide to make subscribing to their newsletter free or paid, and to make specific posts publicly available to non-subscribers.[40] As of 2020, the minimum subscription fee was $5/month or $30/year,[40] and Substack usually takes a 10% cut from subscription payments.[37][9] In October 2025, Substack reported that 50,000 creators were earning money on its platform, of whom at least 50 were making more than $1 million.[52] Substack earns no revenue from advertisements placed by publishers.[53] In February 2019, the platform began allowing creators to monetize podcasts. Substack reported 11,000 paid subscribers as of 2018, rising to 50,000 in 2019.[54]
Substack raised an initial seed round in 2018 from investors including The Chernin Group, Zhen Fund, Twitch CEO Emmett Shear, and Zynga co-founder Justin Waldron.[55] Andreessen Horowitz provided $15.3 million in Series A funding in 2019, some of which went to bringing high-profile writers into Substack's network.[56] Substack has provided some content creators with advances to start working on their platform.[37]
In 2019, the site provided a fellowship to some writers, which included a $3,000 stipend and a one-day workshop in San Francisco. The decline of sports-oriented publications such as Sports Illustrated, Deadspin, and SB Nation, coupled with the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, led to a surge in sports journalists moving to write on Substack in 2019 and 2020. Substack competes with subscription site The Athletic in this submarket, so McKenzie says the company recruits less strongly in that market.[9] In 2020, after the onset of the pandemic, Substack extended grants of $1,000–$3,000 to over 40 writers to begin working on the platform.[9] It expanded into comics content in 2021 and signed creators including Saladin Ahmed, Jonathan Hickman, Lee Knox Ostertag, Scott Snyder, and James Tynion IV, paying them while keeping their subscription revenue. After their first year, Substack will take 10 percent of subscription revenue.[57]
Substack's founders reached out to a small pool of writers in 2017 to acquire its first creators.[10] Bill Bishop was among the first to put his newsletter, Sinocism, on Substack, offering its daily content for $11 a month or $118 a year.[4] As of 2019, Bishop's Sinocism was the top-paid newsletter on the service.[54] By late 2020, the conservative newsletter The Dispatch became the top Substack user, with more than 100,000 subscribers and over $2 million in first-year revenue, according to founder Steve Hayes.[53] In May 2021, Substack acquired Brooklyn-based startup People & Company.[58] In August 2020, Substack reported that over 100,000 users were paying for at least one newsletter.[56] As of August 2021, Substack had more than 250,000 paying subscribers and its top ten publishers were making $7 million in annualized revenue.[7]
