Beehiiv vs Substack: which paid newsletter keeps more?
Beehiiv vs Substack fee math: the exact revenue where beehiiv's flat fee beats Substack's 10% cut, with worked examples from $500 to $10,000/mo.
Beehiiv vs Substack is really an argument about one number: 10%. Substack charges nothing monthly and takes 10% of your paid subscription revenue forever. beehiiv flips the model — a flat $43/mo (billed annually) for its Scale plan and a 0% take rate on subscriptions. Run the math and the lines cross at $430/mo of paid subscription revenue: below that, Substack is the cheaper way to run a paid newsletter; above it, beehiiv keeps more of every dollar, and the gap widens every month you grow.
That crossover is the heart of this comparison, so we’ll work it through properly — with real numbers at three revenue levels — and then look at what each platform gives you beyond the fee structure. All pricing below comes from each platform’s listed plans; verify current pricing on the vendor’s site before you commit.
The short answer
- Pick beehiiv if you expect your paid newsletter to earn more than about $430/mo, or if you want growth tooling — a referral program, boosts, an ad network — built into the platform. Flat pricing means your margin improves as revenue grows.
- Pick Substack if you’re starting from zero, want to publish today with no monthly bill at any list size, and value its discovery network, app, and Notes feed more than the 10% it takes when readers pay.
Both platforms host your newsletter, archive, and paid subscriptions. The difference is who carries the risk: Substack only earns when you do, while beehiiv charges you either way — and rewards you for it once revenue is real.
Pricing at a glance
| beehiiv | Substack | |
|---|---|---|
| Monthly cost | Free to 2,500 subscribers; Scale $43/mo annual ($49 monthly); Max $96/mo annual | $0 at any list size |
| Cut of paid subscriptions | 0% | 10% (plus Stripe fees) |
| Free tier | Launch — up to 2,500 subscribers, unlimited sends | Unlimited subscribers, no monthly fee |
| Paid newsletters | Unlocked on the Scale plan | Built in from day one |
Two details in that table matter more than they look. First, beehiiv’s free Launch plan doesn’t include paid subscriptions — per its listed tiers, charging readers requires Scale, so the flat fee starts the day you monetize, not the day you outgrow the free tier. Second, Substack’s 10% is on top of Stripe’s payment processing, which both platforms pass through — so the 10% is a pure platform premium, not a replacement for processing costs.
The fee math: where the crossover sits
The comparison reduces to a simple equation. Substack’s cost is 10% of whatever your paid subscribers pay you. beehiiv’s cost is $43/mo on annual billing, no matter what they pay you. Those two are equal at $430/mo of subscription revenue ($490/mo if you pay beehiiv month-to-month at $49). Everything after that point is margin you either keep or hand over.
Here’s what that looks like at three revenue levels:
| Paid subscription revenue | Substack’s 10% cut | beehiiv Scale (annual) | Difference |
|---|---|---|---|
| $500/mo | $50/mo | $43/mo | beehiiv saves $7/mo ($84/yr) |
| $2,000/mo | $200/mo | $43/mo | beehiiv saves $157/mo ($1,884/yr) |
| $10,000/mo | $1,000/mo | $43/mo | beehiiv saves $957/mo ($11,484/yr) |
Stripe processing applies on both sides, so it cancels out of the comparison.
At $500/mo the difference is a rounding error — $7 a month is not a reason to migrate a newsletter. At $2,000/mo it’s a real bill: $1,884 a year buys a lot of growth experiments. And at $10,000/mo, Substack’s cut is roughly 23 times beehiiv’s flat fee. A percentage take rate is the platform betting on your success and charging you for it retroactively; a flat fee is you betting on yourself.
The flip side deserves equal weight: below $430/mo, Substack is genuinely cheaper, and at $0 in revenue it’s free while beehiiv’s Scale plan would cost you $516/yr for paid features you’re not yet using. If you haven’t validated that anyone will pay, Substack’s model absorbs that risk for you. This is the same pattern we found across creator platforms in our transaction fees breakdown: percentage fees subsidize your start and tax your scale.
If you want to model your own subscriber count and price point rather than our three examples, the pricing calculator will do the arithmetic for you.
Free list costs by subscriber size
Fee math only applies once you charge. If you’re growing a free list first — which is usually the right move — the cost picture inverts:
| Subscribers | beehiiv | Substack |
|---|---|---|
| 1,000 | $0 | $0 |
| 2,500 | $0 | $0 |
| 5,000 | $42/mo | $0 |
| 10,000 | $42/mo | $0 |
| 25,000 | $42/mo | $0 |
Estimated annual-billing costs from our pricing data; excludes paid add-ons.
Substack is free at every list size, full stop. beehiiv is free to 2,500 subscribers, then roughly $42/mo — about $504/yr — but that price is flat regardless of list size, where most email tools ratchet up per thousand subscribers. So a 100,000-subscriber free newsletter costs the same on beehiiv as a 5,000-subscriber one, which is unusual in this category. Still, for a pure free newsletter with no monetization plans, Substack is the only truly $0 option here.
Growth and discovery: the case for each
Substack’s strongest argument isn’t pricing — it’s the network. Recommendations from other Substack writers, the mobile reader app, and the Notes social feed can all send you subscribers you did nothing to earn. For a writer starting with no audience, that discovery engine is the product, and it’s what the 10% is actually buying. The publishing experience is also famously simple: no plan-picking, no settings maze, just write and hit send.
beehiiv’s counterargument is that it builds the growth machinery into the platform itself: a built-in referral program, boosts (paid subscriber acquisition from other newsletters), a recommendations network of its own, an ad network for monetizing free readers, and noticeably deeper audience analytics. It also gives you a newsletter website alongside email. The trade-off is that more machinery means more to configure — and some of it sits behind the higher Max tier ($96/mo annual), which adds branding removal and priority support.
On the things neither does well: Substack offers minimal automation and segmentation, so if you want welcome sequences or tagging you’ll outgrow it fast. beehiiv is newsletter-only by design — it’s not built for ecommerce automation — and its best features are gated behind paid tiers. Their community ratings are nearly identical (4.7 vs 4.6 on G2 per our data), which tracks with the real difference being the business model, not the quality.
One more consideration that doesn’t show up in a fee table: on Substack, your publication lives inside Substack’s ecosystem — its app, its network, its rules. That’s the source of both the discovery upside and the ownership downside. beehiiv is closer to a conventional email platform in that respect: your list, your site, your funnel.
Which one should you start on?
A pattern worth naming: plenty of creators launch on Substack for the frictionless start and free discovery, then migrate to beehiiv once revenue makes the 10% sting. That’s a reasonable path — email lists export cleanly, and paid subscriptions can be migrated through Stripe — but migrations cost momentum, and the crossover comes earlier than most people expect. $430/mo is roughly 60 subscribers paying $7/mo. If you’re confident you’ll clear that within your first year, starting on beehiiv skips the move entirely.
If you’re still weighing a wider field — including Ghost and Kit, which change the math again — our guide on how to start a paid newsletter compares all four models side by side.
Choose beehiiv if / choose Substack if
Choose beehiiv if:
- You expect paid subscription revenue above ~$430/mo — every dollar past the crossover is margin you keep
- You want referral, boost, and ad-network growth tools built in rather than bolted on
- You’re growing a large free list and want flat, predictable pricing that doesn’t scale with subscribers
- You value analytics and a newsletter website over a social network
Choose Substack if:
- You’re starting from zero and want a $0 bill until readers actually pay you
- Discovery matters more than margin — recommendations, the app, and Notes can grow an audience you don’t have yet
- You want the simplest possible publishing experience with nothing to configure
- Your newsletter is a free one with no monetization plans, where Substack costs nothing at any size
The honest summary: Substack is the better bet on an unproven newsletter, beehiiv is the better business once the newsletter works, and $430/mo of subscription revenue is the line between the two. If you’re not sure which side of that line your plans fall on, our advisor will match you based on your list size, price point, and goals.