Methodology

Where the numbers come from

Every price, take rate, and fee on this site is read directly from the platform's own published pricing page or official documentation. Each platform profile shows its sources and the date we last checked them. We never source pricing from third-party review sites, and no number appears in our prose that isn't in our data layer.

Where a platform doesn't publish a number plainly (for example, prices that only appear behind an interactive slider), we mark the data as partially verified or unverifiedand exclude it from comparisons rather than guess. Advertised "per month" prices are normalized: if a platform displays the annualized rate, we record both the true monthly-billed price and the annual price.

How the calculator works

For your subscriber count and pricing, we select each platform's cheapest eligible plan (using annual billing where it's cheaper), then add three cost components: the platform fee, the platform's revenue share on paid subscriptions, and payment processing (card percentage, per-transaction fee, and recurring-billing fees where they apply). Processing assumes monthly billing for every paid subscriber — annual subscriptions incur fewer per-transaction fees, so treat results as the conservative end.

Freshness

Pricing data is re-verified on a weekly schedule. If a platform's data hasn't been re-verified within 45 days, our build fails rather than serving stale numbers.

How we make money

Some platform links are affiliate links: if you sign up through them, the platform pays us a commission at no cost to you. Two platforms we link to (beehiiv and Kit) pay commissions; others we cover (Substack, Ghost, Buttondown) pay us nothing. The calculator's rankings are computed from the pricing data alone — a platform that pays us nothing will rank above one that does whenever the math says so, as Substack does at low revenue today.