Substack is brilliant marketing.
It tells every writer the same irresistible story:
“It’s free to start. You keep 90% of paid subscriptions.
We handle the tech, the payments, the newsletter.”
And for a lot of people, that’s true — at first.
But hidden inside that promise are the quiet trade-offs that make Substack both a gift and a trap.
Let’s unpack them.
1. The Price Tag That Looks Like Freedom
Substack takes 10% of your revenue, plus Stripe’s ~3% processing fee.
That means if you earn $50,000 from paid subscribers, Substack collects roughly $6,500 every year.
At $100,000, that’s $13,000 — every year, forever.
You don’t notice it when you’re small.
But when you grow, you’re paying a silent subscription to your own success.
Substack’s business model scales against you — not with you.
It’s a revenue share for convenience.
And convenience is expensive over time.
2. The Hidden Cost: Audience Dependency
Substack positions itself as your platform, but it’s also a platform for itself.
Your newsletter lives inside Substack’s ecosystem.
Your readers log into Substack to read your posts.
Your posts get discovered through Substack’s internal network.
That’s great until you realize you’re training your readers to stay on Substack — not your own site.
Even though you can export your subscriber list, that doesn’t equal ownership.
Why?
Because owning data and owning attention are not the same thing.
You can take the CSV file of emails.
But you can’t take the audience behavior, the habit, the feed, the ecosystem that Substack controls.
And when the platform changes its discovery algorithm, its policy, or its payout rules — your “independent” business moves with it.
That’s not ownership. That’s tenancy.
3. The Platform Trap: When Growth Becomes Dependence
Every platform follows the same arc:
Start free and frictionless to attract creators.
Centralize discovery and communication.
Monetize through the network you helped build.
Substack is already there.
When you grow, you don’t just pay the fee — you also compete inside a feed you don’t control.
It’s the YouTube playbook, just with prose.
And if you ever leave?
You take your list, but you lose your ranking, your archives, and your SEO juice.
Because your content, your links, and your subscribers are still theirs.
4. The Myth of Exportability
Substack supporters often say:
“You can export your list anytime. You’re not locked in.”
Technically true.
Practically false.
Here’s why exports aren’t real freedom:
Most creators never do it — it’s cumbersome, risky, and breaks automations.
Even if you move your list, you lose engagement metrics and deliverability history.
Readers may not recognize your new sender domain, killing open rates.
Your old links still live on Substack’s URLs.
That’s like saying you “own your house” because you can take the furniture when the landlord evicts you.
You don’t own the house. You own your stuff inside it.
5. The Long-Term Cost of Staying
If you’re using Substack for a side project, the economics are fine.
But if you plan to build a real publishing business, the math compounds brutally.
Revenue
Substack (10%)
Stripe (~3%)
You Keep
$10,000
$1,000
$300
$8,700
$50,000
$5,000
$1,500
$43,500
$100,000
$10,000
$3,000
$87,000
$250,000
$25,000
$7,500
$217,500
That’s fine for Substack — but imagine paying $30,000 a year just for permission to email your own readers.
At some point, you’re no longer a writer using a tool.
You’re a content supplier inside someone else’s product.
6. What Real Ownership Looks Like
Owning your platform doesn’t mean running servers or fighting spam filters.
It means having:
Your own domain
Your own audience data
Control over what, when, and how you publish
Freedom to move without losing momentum
Tools like Ghost, Buttondown, or EazySites exist because creators eventually outgrow the Substack trade-off.
They want to build a business — not rent one.
7. Why EazySites Exists (and Where It’s Going)
EazySites was born from this exact tension.
We saw creators fall into a choice between:
Ease (Substack, Medium, Patreon)
Ownership (WordPress, Ghost, custom stacks)
We thought: why not both?
So we started small — a system that:
Gives each creator their own site and domain
Combines posts + newsletters + offers in one home
Builds a rhythm around publishing (one post per day, one newsletter per week)
Keeps the data portable — truly yours
It’s early. We’re not a Substack replacement yet.
But we’re building toward a model where your growth doesn’t cost you more, and your work never belongs to us.
Because “free” isn’t freedom — and “owning” a CSV isn’t the same as owning your audience.
Final Thought
Substack made it easy to start writing.
The next step is making it easy to own what you build.
EazySites is for that step.
Join the early creator list → eazysites.com/early