Substack Fee Calculator

Substack Fees at a Glance

Substack charges its fees on each paid subscription payment.

Fee	Percentage	Flat	Notes
Platform fee	10%	—	—
Stripe processing	2.9%	$0.30	—

What You Keep

The flat component is what makes small sales expensive. The same fee schedule costs a very different effective rate depending on the order size:

Sale	Fees	You receive	Effective rate
$5.00	$0.95	$4.06	18.90%
$20.00	$2.88	$17.12	14.40%
$50.00	$6.75	$43.25	13.50%
$100.00	$13.20	$86.80	13.20%
$500.00	$64.80	$435.20	12.96%

Ten Percent, Only on Paid Subscriptions

A free newsletter on Substack costs nothing. The 10% starts the moment you turn on paid subscriptions and applies to every payment after that, with Stripe's processing on top.

Subscription	Platform 10%	Stripe	You keep
$5 / month	$0.50	$0.45	$4.05
$8 / month	$0.80	$0.53	$6.67
$10 / month	$1.00	$0.59	$8.41
$50 / year	$5.00	$1.75	$43.25
$100 / year	$10.00	$3.20	$86.80

Annual Plans Are Materially Better

An annual subscription pays Stripe's flat 30¢ once rather than twelve times. On a $10/month plan billed monthly you lose $3.60 a year to flat fees alone; the same revenue as a $100 annual plan loses 30¢. Combined with the churn you avoid, the discount most writers offer on annual plans pays for itself several times over.

The 10% Is Not the Real Cost

The genuine trade-off is portability. Substack owns the payment relationship, and moving a paid list elsewhere means asking every subscriber to re-enter a card. Export your email list regularly — that part you do own — and understand that the 10% buys distribution and convenience, not just infrastructure.

Recommendations Cut Both Ways

Substack's recommendation network is the main reason writers accept the rate: it drives free-subscriber growth that would otherwise cost real money in advertising. Whether that is worth 10% forever depends entirely on how much of your growth arrives through it.

Charging to Hit a Target Payout

Adding 12.90% to your price under-recovers, because the percentage then applies to the larger amount as well. The correct gross-up divides:

`` charge = (target + flat fees) ÷ (1 − percentage rate) ``

To receive	Charge
$100.00	$115.15
$1,000.00	$1,148.45

Reducing What You Pay

• Raise average order value. The flat fee is fixed, so bundling two $20.00 orders

into one $40.00 order saves the second flat charge outright.

• Watch the optional surcharges. International and currency-conversion fees stack on top

of the base rate and are easy to miss when you price for a domestic market.

• Negotiate at volume. Most processors will discuss custom rates once you are processing

meaningful monthly volume; the published rate is a starting point, not a law.

• Do not migrate for 0.2%. The engineering and support cost of changing platforms

usually exceeds a small rate difference for years.

The 10% applies only once you turn on paid subscriptions; free newsletters cost nothing.