I also disagree that 10% of revenue is a "huge" chunk. Running your own mail list and custom domain isn't trivial (not to mention acquiring readers in the first place).
> Running your own mail list and custom domain isn't trivial
Regardless of whether this is trivial or not, Substack is a service, not a partner.
If one day you decide to increase your prices and work your ass off to produce more valuable content to your readers, why should Substack get more money?
If instead of sending newsletters we were talking about ecommerce (which is way less trivial) would you be ok with Shopify charging 10% of revenue?
What about AWS charging you 10% of your revenue?
- Shopify
- Sendgrid
- Mailchimp
- Wordpress.com
- Firebase
- Vercel
- Netlify
- Surge
Even free blog platforms give you customs domains with HTTPS for free: https://hashnode.com/
For example, these days most wordpress hosts do this for you for free.
Not that I think it's unreasonable to charge for this, just saying it's probably not the reason.
The alternative is a self-hosted or SaaS subscription to something like Ghost or Mailchimp. $50 seems like a better deal to me.
I wonder why they're doing this. Substack is already taking 10% of revenue which is huge.
I think a better model would have been to offer it for free to paid newsletters so it's considered a premium feature and it can't be abused by their users not generating any revenue.