Why I moved from Substack to Ghost with 13 subscribers
I had thirteen subscribers.
That’s the whole reason why the move was easy, and it’s the only piece of advice in this post that I would push on anyone. Every article you will read about leaving Substack is written by someone with ten thousand subscribers, agonizing over the recommendation network they’re about to walk away from. I had thirteen subscribers. Leaving Substack cost me nothing, because there was nothing to lose.
If you are thinking about where your publication should live online, the cheapest time to decide is now, before any switching costs accrue. Over time, that window will close quietly and you won’t get a warning. One day you’ll be faced with the dilemma: stay or go, and all the baggage associated with the decision.
This article is about what I moved to, what it cost, what I gave up, and who I think should ignore everything I say.
Why I left
Two reasons, and I want to be straight up about both.
The first is that Substack is a closed ecosystem, and I did not want to spend the next five years building a community of subscribers inside of one. I am in this for the long haul and I wanted a platform I can grow into rather than one I will eventually need to escape.
The second is that I am not fond of Substack's content moderation policies. I am increasingly tired of platforms that won’t take responsibility for what they host, and it seemed to me that the closed nature of the ecosystem was part of why that responsibility never quite landed anywhere. Of course, that’s just my view. Plenty of writers I respect have looked at the same facts and stayed, and I’m not interested in telling them they are wrong. But it was a real part of my decision and it would be dishonest to leave it out.
Why not Beehiiv
Beehiiv was the obvious alternative and on paper it beat Ghost. Free up to 2,500 subscribers. Zero percent of subscription revenue. A Boosts network that will actively buy you subscribers. If I had been optimizing for growth or for cost, I should have gone there.
But I didn’t and for one reason. Beehiiv is also a closed, venture-backed, proprietary platform. The terms are more generous than Substack's today, and today is doing a lot of work in that sentence. If my objection to Substack is structural, then swapping it for a different company's software under a different company's terms does not answer the objection. It just resets the clock, putting me right back where I began with the Substack decision.
Ghost is open source. I can host it myself if I ever need to. I may never need to, but the exit exists by construction rather than by permission, and that turns out to be the thing I actually wanted.
There is a second reason, and it is more practical. Beehiiv is a newsletter platform with a website attached. Ghost is a website with a newsletter attached. Indie Author Notes has four sections, a Week Notes archive, standing pages and a resources area. It is a publication, not a mailing list, and I wanted a tool that thinks about it in that way.
What it costs, honestly
Substack takes 10% of every paid subscription, plus Stripe's cut on top. Ghost takes nothing. You pay Stripe and a flat hosting fee, currently $18 to $29 a month depending on the plan.
That difference matters enormously at scale and not at all to me just yet. My content is free while I build a base. So the 10% I am avoiding is 10% of nothing, and my hosting bill is pure cost.
Run the crossover and it’s not currently close in my favor. On the $29 plan, Ghost only becomes the cheaper option once subscription revenue passes roughly $290 a month. I am nowhere near that. Substack was free. Beehiiv would have been free.
I did not save money. I spent money to own the thing. Right now, I’m comfortable with that, but I am not going to dress it up as thrift or near-term savings.
The plan is to layer in subscription tiers over time for the more advanced and productized material, and at that point the economics invert permanently. That’s what I mean by a slow-build platform. I would much rather pay for the shape of the business I want in five years than optimize for the one I have this month.
The tinkering problem
Ghost is built for people who like to take the hood off and look inside. Themes, an actual API, webhooks, custom integrations. I looked at my history and my truth. I’m a tinkerer. I looked at Ghost and instantly felt at home.
But I want to be careful here, because this is the kind of reasoning that sounds like a feature and ends up being at least half the cost.
The whole argument of Indie Author Notes is that time is the binding constraint for those of us in the middle. You can’t write the next book and you can’t afford to hire help, and the hours are the thing you never get back. Handing someone like that a platform with infinite surface area to fiddle with is not an obvious gift. I’ve got a documented history of adding things. I’ve spent my evenings rebuilding a website that didn’t need rebuilding while my latest manuscript sat untouched.
So Ghost's tinkerability is genuinely why I chose it and genuinely something I have to watch out for. Both can be true. If you are in the messy middle, every hour you spend inside a theme file is an hour not spent on the thing that actually makes money, and Ghost will happily let you spend all of your time tinkering.
What helps is that the API provided by Ghost is not a decoration for me. I already run automations through Make and Airtable for everything else I do. Ghost can grow into becoming a part of that stack. Substack could only ever be a place I typed or pasted things into. That’s what I really meant when I said I wanted more flexibility, and it’s the difference between tinkering that expands what I can do and creates efficiency and tinkering that just passes the time.
What I gave up
Substack's recommendation network and discovery feed represent real content distribution, and Ghost has no equivalent. Neither does self-hosting. I walked away from a growth mechanism and I got nothing to replace it by switching to Ghost.
But I can live with that, because promoting my books through social media, PR, advertising, podcasts and everything else is built into the work I’m used to doing anyway. As an indie author you end up doing that work whether or not your publishing platform helps. But if your entire growth plan was the recommendation engine, understand that you are giving it up, and that the replacement is you and your time.
I also kept MailerLite running alongside Ghost, which surprises people. But for me, the two serve different audiences. MailerLite supports my fiction readers. Indie Author Notes is for other indie authors. Those are not the same list and I don’t believe that they should be. That may change over time. But for now the overlap is small enough that collapsing them would serve neither group well.
The last thing that helped was not a feature. I joined Revenue Rulebreaker and their Legends group, which is full of people building in this ecosystem. Support and community turned out to matter more than any comparison table, because most of what slows you down on a new platform is not knowing what normal looks like.
Who should not do this
If you want to play it safe, a closed ecosystem is not a character flaw. It is a reasonable trade off.
If you are not a natural tinkerer, or you are honest with yourself that you don’t have the hours to learn how to use a new platform, Ghost will cost you more than it provides. While the freedom of Ghost is real, so is the upkeep and maintenance.
And if you already have a substantial Substack audience built on recommendations, the calculation will be completely different from mine. I moved with thirteen subscribers. That’s not courage or overhead. It’s timing.
Which for me is the point. The best moment to choose where your work lives is before the choice and decision become too expensive to make.
