Does your subscription price change what you pay in fees?

The same revenue, collected three ways

Most fee comparisons hold your subscription price fixed and vary the platform. Flip it around: hold the money fixed and vary the price. Take a 2,000-subscriber newsletter grossing $1,000/month from paid subscriptions, and collect that $1,000 three ways — 200 readers at $5/month, 100 readers at $10/month, or 40 readers at $25/month. Identical revenue, identical list size, and a bill that moves every time.

On Ghost's Publisher (up to 2,500 members) plan, that $1,000 costs $135/month to collect at $5 (13.5% of gross), $105 at $10 (10.5%), and $87 at $25 (8.7%). That's $48/month — about $576/year — separating the cheapest and most expensive way to collect the exact same money. Substack shows the same pattern from a higher base: $196 (19.6%) down to $148 (14.8%), a $48/month swing. Model your own price point in the calculator.

The reason: $0.30 rides on every payment

Fees on a newsletter come in two shapes — a percentage of what you charge, and a fixed amount per payment. The percentage doesn't care what your price is: 10% of $1,000 is the same whether that $1,000 arrived in 200 payments or 40. The fixed part is what moves. Stripe charges $0.30 per transaction on Substack, beehiiv, Ghost, and Buttondown, and Kit's bundled Commerce fee carries its own $0.30 per transaction — so cutting your price in half while doubling your subscriber count doubles the number of times that fixed fee gets charged.

Seen against a single payment, it's stark. That $0.30 is 6% of a $5 subscription and 1.2% of a $25 one. Set the plan fee aside and look only at what a single payment loses: one $5 payment on Ghost gives up $0.44 — 8.8% of it — while one $25 payment gives up $1.02, or 4.08%. On Substack the same two payments lose 19.6% and 14.8%. Nothing about the platform changed between those numbers; only the size of the payment did. The mechanics of the processing layer are in newsletter payment processing fees.

What your price point doesn't change: the ranking

Here's the part worth knowing before you go re-pricing anything. Ranked cheapest first at the $5 price point: Buttondown at $118, beehiiv at $132.08, Ghost (Pro) at $135, Kit at $144.17, Substack at $196. At the $25 price point: Buttondown at $70, beehiiv at $84.08, Ghost (Pro) at $87, Kit at $96.17, Substack at $148. Same order — every platform shifted down together.

The gap between the cheapest and most expensive of the five is $78/month at the $5 price point and $78/month at the $25 one. Every platform here charges the same fixed amount per payment, so a change in transaction count moves all five bills by the same dollars — which means price point and platform choice behave as two independent levers. Pick the platform on structure, which is the flat-fee-versus-revenue-share trade covered in flat fee or revenue share, and treat your price as a separate question.

The honest limits of this comparison

This holds gross revenue constant while the price moves, which is a modeling choice, not a promise. In practice a $25 newsletter converts a much smaller share of a list than a $5 one, and whether 40 readers will pay $25 where 200 would pay $5 is a question about your newsletter, not about fees. What the math does tell you is the direction and size of the fee effect once you've made that call: at any given revenue, fewer-and-larger payments cost less to collect than many-and-smaller ones, on all five platforms.

The list size is also deliberate. It sits at 2,000 subscribers, inside the 2,500-subscriber bracket where we've verified beehiiv's pricing directly, so all five platforms can be quoted rather than four — above that we don't publish a beehiiv figure, which is why it's absent from the cheapest platform at 100,000 subscribers. Plan fees change with list size, but the per-payment effect described here doesn't: it's driven by transaction count, not by how many people are on your list.

The same logic points at a lever that costs nothing to pull. A subscriber billed annually is one transaction a year instead of twelve, which removes eleven of those fixed per-payment fees without changing your price at all — the numbers are in annual vs monthly billing. And if you're weighing the list-size side of the bill rather than the revenue side, that's what one subscriber costs you per month. Every figure here is computed from published pricing verified as of 2026-08-04; sources are on the methodology page.

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