What makes Substack tick and who’s earning millions
Real earnings data, growth metrics, and what top creators know about turning newsletters into businesses
If the business of writing interests you, hit follow. I break down creator economy numbers like this regularly.
Heather Cox Richardson is a history professor from Maine. She writes about American history and politics from her home office. She also, by most credible estimates, earns more than $1 million a month doing it.
That revenue comes from a lone internet newsletter: Substack. Yes, the platform this article is hosted on right now.
Richardson’s publication, Letters from an American, has more than 2.5 million subscribers on Substack, the platform that turned email into one of the most profitable distribution channels in media. She outearns most media CEOs, most newspaper editors, and almost certainly every other history professor on the planet.
And she’s not alone. As of March 2025, Substack had crossed 5 million paid subscriptions, with more than 4 million total publications on the platform. Thousands of writers are earning real money. Some are earning life-changing money.
A history professor from Maine now outearns most media executives. She did it with an email list and a nightly writing habit.
This is a story about what happens when you strip the middlemen out of the relationship between a writer and a reader. When you let the person who makes the thing keep most of the money. When the business model is so simple you can explain it over lunch.
The 10% cut
Most business models in media are complicated. Substack’s isn’t.
You write a newsletter. You set a price (or don’t; free newsletters cost nothing to run). Readers subscribe. When someone pays, Substack takes 10%. Stripe, the payment processor, takes roughly 2.9% plus 30 cents per transaction. You keep everything else.
That’s the whole model.
Let’s make it concrete. Say you charge $10 a month. Out of that $10, Stripe takes about $0.59. Substack takes $1.00. You pocket $8.41. For a $50 annual subscription, you keep roughly $43.55 after both cuts.
Compare that to traditional publishing, where an author might see 10-15% of a book’s cover price. Or journalism, where a staff writer’s salary represents a fraction of the revenue their work generates; the rest gets absorbed by office leases, sales teams, middle management, and whatever the strategy department does all day.
Substack only makes money when its creators make money. That single alignment explains most of the platform’s decisions.
The incentive structure carries more weight than the percentages. Substack can’t profit from your work unless you profit first. There’s no advertising revenue tempting the platform to optimise for clicks over quality. No algorithm deciding which of your posts gets shown to your own subscribers. The email goes out. The reader gets it. The economics flow from there.
For free newsletters, Substack charges nothing at all. Zero. The platform bets that if you grow an audience writing for free, some percentage of those readers will eventually pay, and then Substack gets its cut. It’s patient capitalism in an industry addicted to quarterly results.
From three guys and an idea to 5 million paying subscribers
Chris Best, Hamish McKenzie, and Jairaj Sethi founded Substack in 2017 with a thesis that seems obvious in retrospect: people would pay writers directly for good work if you made it easy enough.
The early years were slow. A few high-profile journalists joined. Some left traditional publications. The media industry watched with a mix of curiosity and scepticism. Then the numbers started compounding.
By 2021-2022, Substack had crossed 1 million paid subscriptions. The sceptics then started paying attention.
Fourteen months later, in November 2023, they hit 2 million.
Then things accelerated. Big time.
By March 2025, the platform announced 5 million paid subscriptions, 67% year-over-year growth. More than 20,000 publications had at least some paying subscribers.
The company raised $100 million at a $1.1 billion valuation, a far cry from the $585 million valuation of its 2021 Series B. They experimented with a “Substack Pro” programme that offered advances to big-name writers, then wound it down by 2022 when the organic model proved it didn’t need subsidies to attract talent.
The growth curve tells you something: Substack didn’t need to buy its way to scale. The writers came because the economics worked.
And the inflection point wasn’t any single feature or marketing push. It was cumulative. Enough writers making enough money attracted more writers, whose audiences attracted more readers, who discovered more writers. A genuine growth loop (not the kind you put in a pitch deck to impress venture capitalists).
The people actually getting rich
Revenue estimates for individual Substack creators are, by necessity, imprecise. Substack doesn’t publish individual earnings. But between public statements from writers, reporting from outlets like Semafor and the New York Times, and some straightforward maths based on disclosed subscriber counts, you can sketch a reasonable picture.
Heather Cox Richardson (Letters from an American) sits at the top. TIME named her to its 2025 Creators list, and the numbers are staggering by any standard. With more than 2.5 million subscribers and an estimated 200,000+ paying, credible analyses put her revenue above $1 million per month. She publishes almost every night, writing accessible political history that connects past to present. No staff. No sales team. Just her, a laptop, and an audience that grew one subscriber at a time.
Lenny Rachitsky (Lenny’s Newsletter) focuses on product management, a niche you’d think too narrow to support serious revenue. It isn’t. With over a million subscribers and an estimated $4 million or more annually from his newsletter, podcast, and job board combined, he’s built a one-person media operation. He charges a premium ($15/month or $150/year), publishes in-depth guides and interviews, and 78% of his new subscribers came from Substack’s recommendation network alone.
Bari Weiss (The Free Press) took a different path: she built a full newsroom around her Substack. At one point she reportedly had more than 100,000 paid subscribers, which at standard pricing would put estimated revenue well above $10 million annually. (The Free Press has since expanded beyond its Substack origins, but the newsletter was the launchpad.)
Emily Oster (ParentData) is a Brown University economist who writes about parenting with a radical premise: parents deserve actual data instead of guilt trips. Her estimated annual revenue falls somewhere between $1 million and $3 million. She turned academic expertise into a direct-to-reader business that no university press could match.
Matt Yglesias (Slow Boring) left Vox, the publication he co-founded, to write his own policy newsletter. Estimated revenue: $1 million to $2 million a year. His audience is smaller than Richardson’s but willing to pay for wonky, detailed political analysis that doesn’t fit the format constraints of traditional media.
A few corrections to the usual narrative, though. Casey Newton moved his publication Platformer off the platform entirely. The creator economy is fluid. Writers move. Revenue shifts. But the underlying economics don’t change.
The writers earning millions on Substack share one trait: deep expertise in a specific domain that readers can’t easily find elsewhere.
The mid-tier maths
The million-dollar earners make for good headlines. But the real story is happening at a scale that’s far more attainable and, for most writers, more relevant.
Kevin Kelly wrote about the “1,000 True Fans” concept back in 2008. The idea was simple: you don’t need millions of fans. You need a thousand people willing to pay you directly. Substack is the clearest real-world proof that this thesis works.
Let’s walk through the numbers.
1,000 paid subscribers at $8/month. After Substack’s 10% and Stripe’s cut, you keep roughly $6,950 per month. That’s about $83,400 a year, more than the median US household income. From a newsletter.
Double that to 2,000 subscribers at $10/month and you’re looking at roughly $17,400 per month, or $208,800 a year. That’s a senior software engineer’s salary at a large tech company. From writing.
Even at 500 paid subscribers and $7/month, you’d clear about $3,045 per month ($36,500 a year). Not enough to quit your day job in most cities, but enough to fund a sabbatical, pay off a mortgage faster, or prove the concept before you go full-time.
Now, the conversion reality. Substack used to claim 5-10% free-to-paid conversion rates, but real-world data suggests the average sits closer to 2-5%, with political newsletters converting significantly higher. So to get 1,000 paid subscribers, you probably need 20,000 to 50,000 free subscribers first.
Fifty thousand free subscribers is not a small number. But it’s achievable. It takes consistency, a clear niche, and time. Most successful Substack writers spent a year or more building their free list before launching a paid tier. (Honestly, the “overnight success” stories almost never are.)
1,000 paying subscribers at $8 a month nets you $83,000 a year. That number should change how you think about your expertise.
The maths bears repeating because it changes the calculus. You don’t need to be famous. You don’t need a million followers. You need to know something deeply, communicate it well, and find your thousand.
What niches actually convert
Some niches convert free readers to paid subscribers at much higher rates than others.
Politics and current affairs dominate by raw revenue. Richardson’s success isn’t an outlier in this category; political writing attracts passionate, habitual readers who’ll pay for a perspective they trust. The emotional stakes are high, the news cycle never stops, and readers feel they need the analysis, not just that they’d enjoy it.
Technology and business newsletters punch above their weight because the information has direct professional value. Lenny’s readers aren’t subscribing for entertainment; they’re subscribing because his advice on product management can influence career decisions worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. The return on a $15/month subscription is obvious when you frame it that way.
Parenting and health convert well for a similar reason. When the topic is your child’s wellbeing, you’ll pay for reliable information. Oster built her audience precisely because anxious parents were drowning in contradictory advice and desperate for someone who could actually read the research papers. (I get it. I’ve been that parent at 2 a.m., doom-scrolling parenting forums.)
Finance newsletters have built-in monetisation logic. If a newsletter helps you make (or avoid losing) money, the subscription pays for itself.
Culture and food sit in a middle ground. Conversion rates tend to be lower, but the audiences are loyal and the competition is thinner. A food writer with 500 paying subscribers might be the only serious voice covering, say, regional Japanese fermentation techniques. That specificity is the moat.
The pattern across all of these: readers pay for knowledge they can’t easily get elsewhere. Generic commentary on topics that are well-covered by free media has the hardest time converting. The more specific your expertise, the more defensible your subscription revenue.
The features that built the growth engine
Substack started as a tool for sending emails. It’s grown well past that.
Over the past few years, the platform has added a social layer called Notes (think Twitter, but calmer and tied to your reading habits), a recommendation network that lets writers cross-promote each other, podcast hosting, group chats, custom domains, a dedicated mobile app, and the ability to bundle multiple publications into a single subscription.
Each of these compounds growth in a specific way.
The recommendation network is probably the single most important feature for new writers. When you subscribe to a Substack, the writer can recommend other publications. These recommendations appear at the moment of highest engagement: right after a reader has decided to follow someone. The result is organic, trust-based discovery. “If you like my writing, you’ll probably like hers.” It works because it’s personal, not algorithmic.
Notes gives writers a reason to be present on the platform between newsletter issues. Short-form thoughts, links, questions, conversations. For readers, it transforms Substack from a thing that sends you emails into a place you visit. That shift, from email tool to reading destination, is worth billions to the company, though they’d never frame it that way.
The mobile app changed reading behaviour. Instead of newsletters competing for attention in a cluttered email inbox, they sit in a dedicated reading environment. Open rates for in-app readers tend to be higher. The reading experience is cleaner. And once a reader has the app installed, they’re far more likely to discover new writers through the platform’s recommendation surfaces.
The recommendation network is Substack’s best-kept advantage: trust-based discovery, delivered at the moment of highest reader engagement.
Podcasts and video let writers reach audiences who’d rather listen than read. Some of the top publications now have companion podcasts that serve as both a content format and a discovery channel; podcast listeners convert to paid subscribers at healthy rates because they’ve already invested hours of attention.
Bundling lets multiple writers offer a combined subscription at a discount. It’s clever because it creates value for the reader (more content, lower per-publication cost) while giving smaller writers access to larger writers’ audiences.
None of these features would matter if the core economics were broken. But because the 10% model keeps the incentives clean, every new feature genuinely serves writers and readers rather than extracting more value from them. That’s rare in tech platforms. And it’s a large part of why the whole engine keeps running.
Your email list is your career insurance
Here’s what separates Substack from every social media platform you’ve ever built an audience on.
You own your subscriber list.
Not “own” in the vague sense that the platform promises not to do anything bad with it. Own in the concrete, operational sense: you can export your entire subscriber list, with email addresses, at any time, for any reason. You can take that list to a different email provider tomorrow. Substack can’t hold your audience hostage because the audience data belongs to you.
This matters more than it might seem. Think about what happens when you build a following on Instagram, or TikTok, or Twitter. The platform controls distribution. An algorithm change can cut your reach in half overnight. You have followers, but you don’t have their contact information. If the platform dies or decides it doesn’t like you, your audience evaporates.
With an email list, the relationship is direct. You have their email address. They gave it to you voluntarily. No algorithm sits between your work and their inbox. If Substack vanished tomorrow (it won’t, but hypothetically), you’d have a CSV file of everyone who wanted to hear from you, and you could set up shop anywhere.
When you build on social media, you’re a tenant. When you build an email list, you own the building.
This is why experienced creators often describe their email list as their most valuable professional asset. More valuable than their social media following. More valuable, in many cases, than their job. An email list is career insurance: an audience you can take with you through every career transition, platform shift, and industry upheaval for the rest of your working life.
And Substack gives you the tools to build that list, the recommendation network to grow it, and the payment infrastructure to monetise it, while letting you keep both the data and roughly 87 cents of every dollar.
The platform is still growing at 67% year over year. Niches remain underserved. The economics are transparent and writer-friendly. If you have expertise in something (anything) that other people want to understand more deeply, the infrastructure to turn that into income is already there.
You don’t need to be famous. You don’t need a journalism degree or permission from an editor.
You need something worth saying, the discipline to say it regularly, and a thousand people who agree it’s worth $8 a month.
Two years ago would’ve been the ideal time to start. But the window hasn’t closed; if anything, it’s still widening.