Switching from Ghost to Substack: what happens to your fees

A plan fee out, a percentage in

Ghost and Substack charge for opposite things. Ghost bills a plan fee that steps up with the size of your member list and takes 0% of subscription revenue — payments run through your own Stripe account, so the only cut on a subscription is Stripe's 2.9% + $0.30. Substack bills no plan fee at any list size and takes 10% of every subscription, on top of which you still pay Stripe's 2.9% + $0.30 card fee and its 0.7% recurring-billing fee — 13.6% of the subscription before the per-transaction cents.

On a $10/month subscription that is $1.66 per paid subscriber per month on Substack against $0.59 on Ghost — 2.8× as much. So the move is a trade: you stop paying a bill that arrives whether or not anyone subscribes, and start paying one that grows with everything you earn. Which side wins depends almost entirely on how many of your readers pay you, and the honest answer splits cleanly in two. Both platforms are verified here to 100,000 subscribers (as of 2026-09-15), so the scenarios below sit inside confirmed brackets. The three-scenario side-by-side is on Ghost vs Substack, and the fee structures on their own are in Ghost pricing explained and how much Substack actually costs.

If nobody pays you, the move is a real saving

Start with the case the fee math answers cleanly. A 1,000-member Ghost newsletter that charges nobody pays $15/month — the Starter plan at its annual rate, $18 if you pay month to month. The same newsletter on Substack costs $0. Substack's 10% is a share of paid revenue, and a share of nothing is nothing, so a free list on Substack is free at any size. Moving saves $15/month — $180 a year — and gives up nothing the fee model can see. The saving grows with the list, too, because Ghost charges by member count: the same free newsletter at 10,000 members pays $88/month on Ghost and still $0 on Substack.

There is a sharper version of this. Ghost's Starter plan cannot sell paid subscriptions at all, so a newsletter sitting on it is not running a paid publication that happens to be cheap — it is paying for a website and a sending tool. The day you switch payments on, Ghost moves you to Publisher and the plan fee goes from $15 to $29/month, a $14 step you pay before the first subscription clears. If you are weighing the free-list version of this question across every platform rather than just these two, what each free tier actually gets you covers the ceilings.

The moment you charge, the arithmetic flips

Give that 1,000-member list 50 paid subscribers at $10/month — $500/month gross — and Ghost costs $58.50/month all-in on Publisher (11.7% of gross) against $83 on Substack (16.6%). The move now costs $24.50/month more. Scale the same 5% conversion rate up and the gap widens with revenue, because a percentage has nothing to spread itself over: at 10,000 subscribers with 500 paid it is $383/month on Ghost against $830 on Substack, a premium of $447/month or about $5,364 a year, and at 100,000 subscribers with 5,000 paid it is $3,224 against $8,300 — $5,076/month.

Watch the two percentages rather than the dollars. Ghost's all-in rate falls as the paid base grows — 11.7% at 1,000, 7.66% at 10,000, 6.45% at 100,000 — because the plan fee is spread over more revenue each time. Substack's sits at 16.6% at all three, because there is nothing to spread: 13.6% of a subscription plus $0.30 comes to $1.66 whether you have 50 paid subscribers or 5,000. That is the whole shape of the trade, and it is the same shape as flat fee or revenue share describes in general.

The flip point is lower than most people expect. On a 1,000-member list at $10/month, Ghost is the cheaper home from 28 paid subscribers ($280/month gross, a 2.8% conversion rate); on a 10,000-member list it takes 83 ($830/month gross, 0.83%); on a 100,000-member list it takes 257 ($2,570/month gross, 0.26%). The bar falls as the list grows — 2.8% of a 1,000-member list, 0.26% of a 100,000-member one — because Ghost's plan fee climbs far more slowly than your revenue does. Below those counts Substack really is cheaper, and the saving is real; above them you are paying for something else. Put your own numbers in the calculator rather than trusting a 5% assumption, and see switching from Substack to Ghost for the same arithmetic in the other direction.

What the premium buys, and what to check first

Nobody moves to Substack for the pricing, so the useful way to hold the premium is as a growth budget with a target on it. Each new paid subscriber nets you $8.34 after Substack's fees at $10/month, so the $447/month premium on the 10,000-subscriber list is covered once the network brings in 54 extra paid subscribers — 10.8% more than you started with — and the 100,000-subscriber premium needs 609 (12.18% more). Substack's recommendations, app and Notes do move readers between publications in a way Ghost does not attempt, so those targets are reachable. They are not automatic. If you cannot name the mechanism that produces them, the premium is just a cost.

Going the other way, what you give up is not only fees. Ghost is a full website with a CMS and themes, your paid subscribers are billed through your own Stripe account, and because Ghost is open source you always have the option of self-hosting, which no hosted-only platform offers. Substack owns the publication surface and the payment relationship instead. Before you move, confirm the things that cost real money: ask both platforms whether existing subscriptions transfer without readers re-entering their cards, how annual subscribers are handled mid-term, and what happens to the URLs your Ghost site already ranks for. We keep migration mechanics out of the data layer because they change often; the fee profiles behind every figure here are on the Ghost and Substack profile pages, with sources on the methodology page.

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