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What your newsletter platform really costs you.

Substack is free to start and takes 10% of every paid subscription. Beehiiv, Kit and MailerLite charge a flat monthly fee and take nothing. Set your list size and your paid revenue, and see the real monthly total, fee plus cut, side by side.

by Ivar Berg. List pricing verified 2026-05-30 from each platform's own page. How we test

Total list size. Free tiers and paid tiers both scale off this.
What your paid subscribers pay you each month. Set to $0 for a free newsletter.
PlatformTotal / month

The crossover

 

Beehiiv, Kit and MailerLite links are affiliate links: we may earn a commission at no extra cost to you, and it never changes the math. Substack is covered editorially with no affiliate relationship. Full disclosure.

How these numbers are calculated

Total monthly cost = flat platform fee + the platform's cut of your paid revenue. The whole point is the crossover: a 0% platform with a flat fee looks expensive at $0 revenue and cheap once you earn real money, while Substack's 10% does the opposite.

  • Substack: $0 platform fee, takes 10% of paid-subscription revenue. (Stripe also takes roughly 2.9% + $0.30 per transaction on every platform, not modelled here since it does not change the ranking.)
  • Beehiiv: 0% cut. Free up to 2,500 subscribers, then Scale at $43/mo up to 100,000, Max at $96/mo above (beehiiv.com/pricing, 2026-05-30).
  • Kit (Creator): 0% cut. $33/mo to 1,000 subs, ~$75 at 5,000, ~$166 at 10,000; above 10,000 is extrapolated at the same marginal rate and labelled an estimate (kit.com/pricing, 2026-05-30).
  • MailerLite (Business): 0% cut. ~$10 at 500 subs, ~$15 at 1,000, ~$39 at 5,000, ~$159 at 25,000; in-between and above values are interpolated at MailerLite's marginal rate (mailerlite.com/pricing, 2026-05-30).

Mailchimp is left out of the live calculation because its price scales on contact count in a way that does not map cleanly to a subscriber slider, see its breakdown instead. Figures are vendor list pricing as of 2026-05-30; verify your exact tier on each platform before switching. Full sourced fee-math is on Beehiiv vs Substack.

Once the math is clear

Beehiiv vs Substack: the 0% vs 10% breakdown
The flagship fee-math, with the revenue level where switching pays for itself.
Beehiiv review: what the flat fee actually buys
Where the $43 Scale tier earns its keep, and where it does not.
Substack alternatives that keep 100% of your revenue
The flat-fee platforms worth moving to, by list size and use case.

Newsletter Switch is an independent comparison site. We are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Beehiiv, Substack, Kit, ConvertKit, MailerLite, Mailchimp, Ghost, Buttondown, or any platform mentioned. All trademarks are the property of their respective owners, used for descriptive comparison (nominative fair use). We earn commissions on some outbound links, see our full disclosure.