There are many factors that have gone into my decision not to use Substack. While I’m glad that platform exists, it doesn’t make sense for me personally.

I don’t need Substack as a publishing platform since I already own my own website. It doesn’t make sense for me to create content that drives traffic to some other site instead of to my own.

Similarly, I don’t need Substack to have the ability to send email newsletters to my subscribers. I already have a more advanced capability to do that, and it wouldn’t make sense for me to switch over instead of continuing to grow my existing mailing list.

I also don’t need Substack to be able to implement a subscription plan to generate more recurring revenue. Once again, I have much more powerful capabilities for that with my own website. To name just one example of the advanced capabilities I have here, with my own membership program (currently under development), I have the additional option to create online courses that I can sell individually or grant access to based on membership level.

Another big reason I don’t use Substack is that, their subscription option is based on a paywall model. Authors can offer paid subscriptions and not place content behind a paywall, but, then, there’s no additional benefit for subscribers and it becomes no different than a recurring donation. I don’t like the idea of publishing articles containing critically important information that people who cannot afford a subscription are unable to access.

I don’t know what kind of analytics Substack users get (e.g., data on traffic, popular content, traffic referrals, etc.), but I’m sure the capabilities I have in this area are superior for journalists who own their own sites, too.

Another really big reason I’m creating a membership program on my own site instead of moving to Substack is because Substack takes a cut of paid subscriptions in the form of a hefty 10% fee. (This is in addition to the usual payment processor fees, which is 2.9% plus $0.30 per transaction with Stripe, which is the service that Substack uses and I happen to use as well.) By publishing my content on my own site and having my membership program here instead of Substack, I can cut out the middleman so that more of my subscribers’ money goes to the purpose for which they intended it.

To give just one more reason, I like having the fullest ownership and control over my content and my publishing platform as possible. Substack has to date proven a valuable asset in combatting censorship. But what if down the road Substack starts censoring, too? We’ve seen it happen with other platforms that independent journalists had flocked to, like Medium and Patreon. I am much more censorship-proof maintaining my own website. It just feels safer for my business model to stay centered around having the fullest ownership and control as possible over every aspect of all my systems, which means sticking with my own website.

I have had countless readers tell me I need to publish on Substack or to express wonderment why I wasn’t already doing that. These aren’t the only factors that have led me to conclude that it would be counterproductive, given my long-term goals, to move to Substack. But hopefully given the above reasons, you can understand why I feel it makes far more sense for me not to move to some other publishing platform like Substack.

For one, there is the risk of censorship, and I am aware that content creators have been banned from Patreon for communicating regime-unapproved messages.

Also, we can make more efficient use of the financial resources by cutting out the middleman (Patreon and other such services charge a fee on top of the payment processor fee.) It’s less wasteful just to host my own crowdfunding.

Additionally, Patreon is designed in large part to be a publisher. Part of the model is that creators can incentivize donations by offering exclusive content to subscribers. This does not jibe with my own model. I don’t wish to place my content behind a paywall, for one, because the whole point is to get the message out to as many people as possible without such obstacles.

There are many other reasons that I won’t get into, but the bottom line is that it makes much more sense for me to self-publish and have readers come to my website rather than directing them to some third-party site.

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