Substack is free to start and keeps 10% of your paid subscription revenue. Ghost charges a flat monthly fee and takes 0%: the cheapest Ghost(Pro) plan that can sell subscriptions, Publisher, costs $29 a month billed yearly for up to 1,000 members. So Substack is the better deal while you're small and want its reader network, and Ghost wins once your paid revenue passes roughly $3,500 a year, or as soon as design, SEO and a custom sending domain matter to you.
Below: what each platform is, the real fees at four revenue levels (October 2026 prices), how they differ on SEO and ownership, how to move from one to the other, and a short quiz that tells you which fits.
Key takeaways
- Substack keeps 10% of every subscription payment; Stripe adds 2.9% + $0.30 per card payment plus a 0.7% Billing fee (Substack help center, October 2026).
- Ghost(Pro) Publisher costs $348 a year for up to 1,000 members and 0% of revenue; at 10,000 members it costs $1,056 a year.
- Break-even: at 1,000 members, Ghost is cheaper once paid revenue passes $3,480 a year (about $290 a month).
- Substack says more than half of new subscribers come from its own network. Ghost gives you no network, but full control of design, domain and SEO.
- Ghost prices by total members (free plus paid), so a big free list with few paying readers costs more on Ghost.
Ghost vs Substack at a glance
| Substack | Ghost (Ghost(Pro) hosting) | |
|---|---|---|
| Price to start | Free, unlimited subscribers | Starter $15/mo billed yearly (no paid subscriptions) |
| Paid subscriptions | Included, Substack keeps 10% | Publisher $29/mo billed yearly and up, Ghost keeps 0% |
| Card fees | Stripe 2.9% + $0.30, plus 0.7% Billing | Stripe fees on your own Stripe account |
| Custom domain | One-time $50, must be a subdomain like www | Included on every plan |
| Newsletter sender | Always yourname@substack.com | Your own domain |
| Design | Substack layouts, logo and colors | Themes, custom themes from Publisher |
| SEO controls | Basic; sitemaps and Search Console verification only come as you grow | Full: meta tags, sitemaps, canonicals, redirects |
| Discovery | Substack app, Notes, Recommendations | None built in; social web (ActivityPub) since Ghost 6.0 |
| Open source / self-host | No | Yes, free if you run your own server |
Prices from Ghost's pricing page and Substack's help center, checked October 19, 2026.
What is Substack and how does it work?
Substack is a newsletter platform where every post is both a web page and an email to your subscribers. You sign up, name your publication, write in a simple editor and hit publish; readers subscribe for free, and you can turn on paid plans (minimum $5 a month or $30 a year) through Stripe.
Its real product is the network. Readers use the Substack app, follow writers in Notes (a short-form feed), and see Recommendations from other writers when they subscribe. On its about page, Substack says it has passed 5 million paid subscriptions, that more than half of new subscribers come from its built-in network, and that over 30% of paid subscriptions start inside it. That network is what you pay the 10% for. For a step-by-step setup, see our guide on how to use Substack.
What is Ghost?
Ghost is an open-source publishing platform for blogs, newsletters and paid memberships, run by a non-profit foundation. You can self-host it for free or pay for Ghost(Pro), the managed version. Members, email newsletters, paid tiers and a website come in one package, and Ghost takes no cut of what you earn. Ghost says publications on its platform earn more than $100 million a year combined (ghost.org).
Ghost 6.0 (released August 4, 2025) added two things that narrow the gap with Substack: built-in analytics (Publisher plan and up on Ghost(Pro)) and a social web reader based on ActivityPub, so people on Bluesky, Mastodon, Threads and Flipboard can follow and reply to your posts. It is not a discovery engine like the Substack app, but you are no longer publishing into a void.
Fees: what each platform costs at your revenue
The fee question decides most switches. Substack's cost grows with your income. Ghost's grows with your audience size: Ghost(Pro) is priced by total members, and members include free subscribers.
Ghost(Pro) Publisher prices, billed yearly: $348 for up to 1,000 members, $552 for 2,500, $756 for 5,000, $1,056 for 10,000, $1,692 for 25,000 and $2,496 for 50,000 (monthly billing costs about 20% more, $35 a month at 1,000 members).
| Scenario (members, paying readers, price) | Paid revenue per year | Substack's 10% | Ghost Publisher per year | Who's cheaper |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1,000 members, 50 paying at $5/mo | $3,000 | $300 | $348 | Substack by $48 |
| 2,500 members, 150 paying at $8/mo | $14,400 | $1,440 | $552 | Ghost by $888 |
| 10,000 members, 600 paying at $10/mo | $72,000 | $7,200 | $1,056 | Ghost by $6,144 |
| 50,000 members, 2,500 paying at $10/mo | $300,000 | $30,000 | $2,496 | Ghost by $27,504 |
Card processing is left out because Stripe charges it on both platforms. Ghost's own comparison page uses the same logic: 1,000 readers paying $5 a month is $60,000 a year, which costs $6,000 on Substack and $348 in Ghost hosting.
The break-even is simple: divide Ghost's annual price by 0.10. At 1,000 members that's $3,480 a year in paid revenue. At 10,000 members it's $10,560. Below those lines Substack is cheaper; above them, every extra dollar you earn makes Ghost look better. If you want to see what you'd actually take home on Substack after Stripe's fees, use the calculator in our Substack subscription pricing guide.
Which one should you pick?
4-question decision helper
Ghost or Substack: which fits you?
Question 1 of 4
Where will your first readers come from?
Pick Substack if you're testing an idea, you have no audience yet, and you'd rather write than configure anything. The network effect is real, and you pay nothing until you earn.
Pick Ghost if paid subscriptions are the business, you already bring your own readers, or you want your brand, domain and sending address to be yours. Many writers start on Substack and move once the 10% starts to sting.
SEO: where Ghost pulls ahead
Ghost ships with the SEO basics you'd expect from a real CMS: editable meta titles and descriptions per post, XML sitemaps, canonical tags, social cards, clean URLs and a redirects file. If organic search is part of your plan, that matters.
Substack is weaker in three specific ways:
- SEO features are gated by growth. Substack's own help center says sitemaps and Google Search Console verification "become available as your publication grows", helped by publishing regularly, growing your list and enabling paid subscriptions (source).
- Without a custom domain, you build substack.com's authority, not yours. The $50 domain must be a subdomain such as www.yourdomain.com, and posts live under
/p/URLs. - No subfolder option. You can't put a Substack at yourcompany.com/blog. Ghost can, but only as an add-on to the Business plan ($199 a month billed yearly) or behind your own proxy if you self-host.
Neither platform will rank you by itself. What moves rankings is publishing pages that answer real searches and earning links to them. If SEO is the main goal, read our breakdown of the best CMS for SEO before you commit.
Ownership, migration and lock-in
Both platforms let you leave with your content and your list. The details differ.
- Substack exports posts, subscriber list and stats as a zip from Settings → Exports. Paid subscribers pay through your own Stripe account, so those billing relationships move with you.
- The iOS app is the catch. Readers who subscribe inside the Substack iPhone app pay Apple, and Apple doesn't transfer those subscriptions to another platform. You keep their email addresses, but they would have to subscribe again (Substack help). In-app payments can't be switched off while payments are connected.
- Ghost's Substack migrator lives in Ghost Admin under Settings → Advanced → Import/Export. You upload Substack's export zip, then the free and paid subscriber CSVs, and keep the same Stripe account so paid members carry over. Ghost's migration docs warn that Substack keeps taking 10% on existing paid subscriptions until you disconnect it, and that you need redirects for Substack's
/p/post URLs if you used a custom domain.
The best-known move is Platformer, Casey Newton's tech newsletter, which left Substack for Ghost in January 2024. Its stated reasons were Substack's content moderation stance and the money: leaving the 10% share saved it tens of thousands of dollars a year.
Substack vs Medium vs Ghost
People often add Medium to this comparison. It solves a different problem.
| Substack | Medium | Ghost | |
|---|---|---|---|
| You earn from | Your own paid subscribers | Medium's Partner Program, paid from members' reading | Your own paid members |
| Platform cut | 10% | Medium sets the payout | 0%, flat hosting fee |
| Subscriber emails | Yours, exportable | Not shared with writers | Yours, exportable |
| Custom domain | $50 one-time | Requires a Medium membership ($5/mo or $50/yr) | Included |
| Built-in readers | Strong network | Strong network | Small |
Medium is for writers who want readers more than a business. Substack is for a newsletter business with help on discovery. Ghost is for a publication you fully own. Other paths exist too: beehiiv takes 0% of subscription revenue but paid subscriptions start on its Lite plan ($49 a month billed yearly, per beehiiv's pricing), and WordPress adds a full website around the newsletter (see Substack vs WordPress).
The third option: a blog on your own domain
If your writing exists to bring customers to a business, rather than to sell subscriptions, both platforms are a detour. A newsletter archive on substack.com or ghost.io does little for your company site's search traffic. A blog on your own domain does, which is the core trade-off in our Substack vs blog guide.
Outrank Blogs is our free option for that: a hosted blog on your own domain or a subfolder like yourbrand.com/blog, free up to 10,000 visits a month, with sitemaps and structured data set up and sign-up forms that send subscribers to the email tool you already use. It does not send newsletters itself, so it's no substitute for Substack or Ghost if the newsletter is the product. Here's the feature-by-feature Outrank Blogs vs Substack comparison.
FAQ
Is Ghost better than Substack?
Ghost is better for publishers who already have an audience, earn more than about $3,500 a year from subscriptions, or care about design, domain and SEO, because it takes 0% and gives full control. Substack is better for beginners because it's free, needs no setup and its network brings new readers. Neither is better for everyone.
Does Substack take 10%?
Yes. Substack keeps 10% of each paid subscription payment, and Stripe separately charges 2.9% + $0.30 per US card payment plus a 0.7% recurring Billing fee. Publishing and free newsletters cost nothing, and the optional custom domain is a one-time $50.
Is Ghost free?
The Ghost software is free and open source if you host it on your own server. Ghost(Pro), the hosted version, has no free plan: Starter costs $15 a month billed yearly but can't sell subscriptions, and Publisher, which can, starts at $29 a month billed yearly for up to 1,000 members.
Can I move from Substack to Ghost later?
Yes. Export your posts and subscriber lists from Substack, then use Ghost's Substack migrator under Settings → Advanced → Import/Export, keeping the same Stripe account so paid members continue. Readers who subscribed through Substack's iOS app pay Apple, so they'd need to resubscribe.
Ghost vs Substack: which is better for paid newsletters?
Below roughly $3,500 a year in paid revenue (at 1,000 members), Substack's 10% costs less than Ghost Publisher's $348 a year. Above that, Ghost is cheaper and the gap widens with every subscriber. Ghost also offers multiple paid tiers and sends email from your own domain.
