The subscriber counts where your newsletter bill jumps

The bill is a staircase, not a slope

Almost nobody charges you per subscriber. Platforms sell headroom in brackets — on Ghost, up to 1,000 members, then 2,500, then 5,000, and so on — and inside a bracket your plan fee doesn't move at all. That has two consequences that pull in opposite directions. Most of your growth is free: on Ghost, once you're past 1,000 members you pay $46/month on its Publisher (up to 2,500 members) plan, and the next 1,500 members you add cost you nothing extra — the bill is still $46/month at 2,500 members.

Then one subscriber costs you a lot. Crossing from 1,000 to 1,001 members on Ghost takes the plan fee from $29 to $46/month — $17 more for a single reader, a 58.6% increase. Kit's first paid bracket does the same thing from the other side of a free tier: its Newsletter plan carries you to 1,000 subscribers for $0, and subscriber 1,001 puts you on Creator (up to 3,000 subs) at $49.17/month.

That first crossing — free plan to paid plan — is covered in when a free tier actually ends. This article is about all the ones after it: where the steps are on each platform, how big they get, and which platforms don't have any. Every figure is computed from published pricing verified as of 2026-08-18, on the cheapest plan that can sell paid subscriptions, assuming annual plan billing wherever it's cheaper than paying monthly.

Where the steps are

Ghost's plan fee changes 8 times between its first paid bracket and its 100,000-member ceiling. The boundaries are at 1,000, 2,500, 5,000, 7,500, 10,000, 25,000, 50,000, 75,000 members, and the fee climbs from $29/month to $274/month across them. Kit steps more often — 14 times, at 1,000, 3,000, 5,000, 8,000, 10,000, 15,000, 20,000, 25,000, 35,000, 45,000, 55,000, 65,000, 75,000, 85,000 subscribers, ending at $515.83/month on its Creator (up to 95,000 subs) plan. Both ladders were captured bracket by bracket across their whole published range, so those are the real boundaries rather than a guess at the shape.

More steps is not worse — it's the opposite. Kit's extra brackets make each one a shorter climb: Kit's run from 5.3% to 50.8% of the previous fee, against 11.4% to 60.2% on Ghost. The single biggest jump on either ladder is Ghost's at 25,000 members, where the fee goes up $67/month at once; Kit's largest is $50/month at 25,000 subscribers. Buttondown publishes only 3 steps — at 1,000, 5,000, 10,000 subscribers — and every one of them is steeper than anything on the longer ladders: crossing 1,000 subscribers raises its fee by 222.2%, from $9 to $29/month. Fewer brackets means each one has more work to do.

The ladders themselves are laid out in Ghost pricing explained, Kit pricing explained and Buttondown pricing explained, and Ghost vs Kit puts the two long ones side by side.

A step is the price of the headroom it buys

A jump looks arbitrary until you divide it by the room it gives you. Ghost's step at 1,000 members costs $17 for 1,500 more members — $11.33 per thousand per month. Its step at 25,000 members is 3.9× the dollars but buys 25,000 members, which works out to $2.68 per thousand. The dearest thousand subscribers anywhere on Ghost's ladder cost $11.33/month and the cheapest $1.32; on Kit, $24.59 and $1.67. On both ladders the dearest headroom is the first bracket you're pushed onto, and it gets cheaper per reader from there.

Which means the steps that sting aren't the big ones. The proportional pain is worst where a bracket suddenly widens: Ghost's steepest jump in percentage terms is at 10,000 members (60.2%, $88 to $141), and it's the point where its brackets go from 2,500 members wide to 15,000. You buy the whole wide bracket the moment you enter it, then coast through it. The per-subscriber view of all this is in what one subscriber costs per month.

Worth being clear about what triggers a step: total list size, free readers included. Nothing in a bracket boundary cares whether a subscriber pays you. A list that grows without converting anyone pushes you up the ladder just as fast as one that doesn't, which is the mechanism behind how many paid subscribers it takes to cover your platform bill.

The platforms with no steps at all

Substack has no brackets because it has no plan fee — $0/month at any list size, including 100,000 subscribers. Your bill is a straight 10% of paid-subscription revenue plus processing, so it rises smoothly with what you earn and ignores your list entirely. That is a genuinely nicer cost shape, and it's why a bracket jump never surprises anyone on Substack. It's also why the total is higher once you're earning: the trade is examined in flat fee or revenue share and how much Substack actually costs.

beehiiv sits in between, with a caveat we won't paper over. In our data its paid plan carries a single $43.08/month price across its whole published range — no steps in it at all. But we've verified beehiiv's pricing directly only to 2,500 subscribers, and beehiiv has historically scaled plan price with list size — so treat its ladder above that as unknown rather than flat. When we can capture those brackets, they'll appear here and in the calculator automatically.

If you're on a bracketed platform, the practical version of all this is short. Know the boundary above you — it's the number that decides your next bill, not your growth rate. Cleaning inactive subscribers is worth real money only if it takes you under one: on Ghost, dropping from 1,001 to 1,000 members saves $17/month, or $204 a year, and dropping 1,500 members without crossing the boundary saves nothing. And since the fee you're stepping into is charged every month, paying for the plan annually where it's cheaper takes the edge off — see annual vs monthly billing. Your own list and price go in the calculator.

Frequently asked questions