A Hundred Readers at $5 Is $450 a Month After Substack's 10%, From a Newsletter That Cost Nothing to Open

Why this pays

A newsletter is the one audience you can carry out of the building: a list of addresses that lands in an inbox with no feed and no algorithm in between. It is also the cheapest paid product on the internet to switch on. The three platforms differ in what they charge, when they pay, and whether the list is yours when you leave.

The floor is the price, not the traffic: Substack's minimum is $5 a month or $30 a year, and there is no subscriber count to reach before paid switches on. A hundred readers at $5 is $450 a month after the 10%, from a publication that cost nothing to open.

The play, in three lines

1. Create the publication where it is free, Substack, beehiiv or Ghost, and send the first post the same day.
2. Export the subscriber list in the first week, when it is nine names and the habit is cheap, and again on the first of every month.
3. When there is something worth paying for, connect Stripe under Settings, Payments, price it at $5 a month or more, and switch Enable payments on.

The path above walks every click. What follows is the reasoning behind each step and the numbers you quote from.

Where the money comes from

• Readers who pay you directly. On Substack a monthly, yearly or founding-member plan through your own Stripe; on Ghost the same through yours. The reader's card is charged, the platform keeps its share, the rest is in your bank within days.
• Advertisers, through beehiiv's Ad Network. Access needs the Scale plan or above and a publication that is actively sending; payouts on the 20th of each month for the prior month's ads, into a beehiiv Wallet you withdraw manually.
• A buyer of the whole publication, later. Only one of the three is built for that sale, and it is not the one most people start on.

The pain you are selling the cure for

The reader is drowning in feeds and wants one voice they chose, arriving on a schedule, that they can pay for once and forget. That is easy to give them. The pain on your side is different: a list you cannot export is an audience you are renting, and every platform's terms include a line that lets it end the account. The cure is a CSV on your own disk, refreshed monthly, from the first week. Everything else on this page is the arithmetic around that file.

Step one: create it where it is free, and send the first post

• Substack is free to publish at any list size; costs start only when paid subscriptions are switched on. Four moves: Create account on Substack.com; profile with a photo, first name and short bio; Substack Home; the plus sign, then Post, which opens the publication. Public by default; a Privacy mode toggle in Settings makes it private.
• beehiiv's free Launch plan allows up to 2,500 active subscribers; the paid plans start after that.
• Ghost is self-hostable; its hosted plan bundles a .link domain free for the first year only, renewing at standard registrar rates.
• Send the first post the same day. A publication with no post has no list to own.

Step two: export the list this week, not the week you leave

• Substack: from the subscribers page, all columns or visible columns only. Subscriber names cannot be included, so the export is addresses and status.
• beehiiv: subscriber data and post content to .csv from publication settings; the download link stays valid for 24 hours, so download the file, do not save the link.
• Ghost: posts and pages as JSON, members as CSV, themes as ZIP, post analytics as CSV, any time from Ghost Admin.
• The list you can export today is the list you own. The rest is a promise in a terms page.

Step three: switch on paid

• Substack: Settings, then Payments in the left navigation, then Connect with Stripe; fill in Stripe's details on Stripe's site; back on Settings set the monthly, yearly and founding-member prices. Minimum $5 a month and $30 a year on US-dollar Stripe accounts, no yearly-only option, and a founding-member annual plan lets readers pay any amount above the other two.
• Then the toggle next to Enable payments. Readers do not see that paid exists until it is on.
• One Stripe account serves one publication; two publications need two.
• Substack keeps 10% of subscription revenue, card processing fees come out on top, and the money moves per transaction, usually within 48 hours. The Substack and beehiiv compare works out where the two pricing shapes cross.

What it costs once it grows

• Substack never charges a plan fee. Its 10% grows with your revenue and is zero while you are free.
• beehiiv's paid plans renew at $517 billed annually for Scale and $1,151 for Max, at the entry subscriber tier.
• Ghost's running cost is the hosting, and there is no pause option: the site goes offline the moment the subscription lapses. Hosting is a single point of failure.
• The newsletter-list ownership axis shows the same three cells beside every other platform on this site.

Who owns what you write

• Substack: original content posted to the platform stays yours and keeps its copyright.
• beehiiv: disclaims ownership but takes a royalty-free, sublicensable, worldwide licence to publish it.
• The words are yours on both; on the second, the platform keeps a licence to use them. Write that line on the card.

Whether the thing can be sold

• Substack: the account cannot be assigned or transferred in any way without Substack's prior written consent.
• beehiiv: publications can be sold or acquired through a manual beehiiv transfer with written confirmation from both workspace Owners; workspace team members do not move with it.
• Ghost: rights under the agreement may be assigned to any party that agrees to the terms in writing.
• If a sale is part of the plan, only one of the three is built for it, and the other two need a consent or an assignment first.

What ends it

• Substack may terminate or suspend an account for any reason at its own discretion; advance notice is described as a courtesy rather than a duty.
• beehiiv may remove content or suspend accounts at its sole discretion over reputational, legal or deliverability risk, and a Digital Products clause lets it remove product listings without notice in fraud cases.
• Ghost ends when the hosting does.
• The CSV from step two is the answer to all three, which is why it is step two and not step seven.

What to do today

1. Create the publication in the four clicks above and send the first post to the people who already know you.
2. Export the list tonight, even at nine names, and set the monthly reminder.
3. When there is something worth paying for: Settings, Payments, Connect with Stripe, $5 or more, Enable payments on.
4. Paste the three lines from your platform's terms onto the card next to the export.