Substack Fee Calculator
Wondering how much Substack is already costing you? Here’s a fee calculator which explains how much you’re losing to Substack, and whether it’s worth moving to a system like WordPress or your own custom-build.
What does Substack actually cost you?
Whether you're already on Substack or thinking about starting there, enter your current or expected monthly subscription revenue to see the real numbers.
At that revenue, Substack takes approximately $0/month, $0/year, in platform and processing fees.
A comparable self-hosted WordPress setup typically costs $3,000–$7,500 as a one-time build or migration.
Based on Substack's ~13.6% effective fee (10% platform + Stripe processing + billing fee). Cost range is typical for a standard newsletter, whether built fresh or migrated from Substack; your exact cost depends on archive size (if migrating) and paid subscription complexity.
Substack vs WordPress: what the fee actually buys you
Substack’s fee isn’t just a processing cost, it’s paying for convenience: no hosting to manage, no plugins to update, and a built-in discovery network. For a newsletter under roughly $1,000 in monthly revenue, that convenience is usually worth more than the fee itself.
Where the trade-off shifts is search visibility. Substack publications generally don’t rank well in Google, since the platform is treated more like a news aggregator than an independent, indexable site. A self-hosted WordPress newsletter, by contrast, can compound organic traffic over years, with each published post remaining a permanent search asset rather than content that mostly lives inside Substack’s own discovery feed.
So the real decision isn’t just cost. It’s whether you’re optimizing for the fastest possible start, or for a platform you fully own and that can grow its own search presence over time. Both are legitimate answers, depending on where you are.