Substack takes a flat 10% platform fee, and Stripe adds its standard 2.9% plus 30 cents on top. Effective rate is higher on cheaper subscriptions because the fixed 30 cent fee is a bigger share of a small charge.
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Substack's pricing is one of the more transparent in the newsletter world: a flat 10% cut of your paid subscription revenue, with no tiers based on subscriber count and no separate plans to choose between. What is easy to miss is that Stripe, which processes the payments, adds its own standard fee on top, so your real take-home is lower than a simple 90% of the subscription price. The calculator above accounts for both.
Substack takes a flat 10% of gross subscription revenue, applied the same way whether you have 10 paid subscribers or 10,000. There is no free tier that unlocks a lower rate at scale and no premium plan that buys a smaller cut, which keeps the pricing simple to reason about even as a publication grows.
That 10% only applies to money that actually changes hands through a paid subscription. Free posts, free subscribers and Substack's other publishing tools carry no fee at all, so the platform fee is entirely tied to monetized revenue rather than audience size or publishing volume.
Payment processing on Substack runs through Stripe, which charges its standard rate of 2.9% plus 30 cents per transaction, separate from and on top of Substack's 10%. Combined, most creators keep somewhere between 81% and 87% of the subscription price, not a flat 90%, and the exact number depends heavily on price.
The 30 cent fixed fee is the reason a $5 monthly subscription and a $20 monthly subscription do not carry the same effective rate. On the $5 tier, that 30 cents alone is 6% of the charge before Substack's or Stripe's percentage cuts are even added, so cheap subscriptions lose a disproportionate share to fixed costs. On a $20 tier, the same 30 cents barely moves the needle.
Because the fixed Stripe fee is charged per transaction rather than per month, switching subscribers to an annual plan collapses twelve fixed fees into one, meaningfully raising your effective take-home rate on the same annualized price. Beyond fee structure, the actual lever that moves revenue the most is subscriber growth itself, and for many newsletters that growth increasingly starts with people finding a piece of content through search rather than a referral or social share.
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