Migrating From Substack: What It Really Costs and How to Do It Right

Substack tells you that you own your email list. And it’s true. What it doesn’t tell you is how much it costs to exercise that ownership.

The technical migration is possible. The real migration, with your subscribers intact, your deliverability working, and your revenue preserved, is a different story. Before deciding to leave (or before choosing Substack knowing you might leave later), you need to understand what leaving actually involves.

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What Substack Lets You Take With You

Credit where it’s due. Substack allows you to export:

• Your full subscriber list as CSV (emails, dates, engagement, payment data)
• All your content (posts, podcasts, archives)
• Your custom domain if you set one up (the Substack subdomain doesn’t transfer, obviously)

This is better than many platforms. Medium, for example, doesn’t give you your subscriber list because technically it’s not your audience. On Substack, it is.

But the clean export in theory has problems in practice.

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The Problems Nobody Anticipates

The CSV with missing data

One creator documented the process: they exported their list of 4,020 subscribers. The CSV contained 3,749 addresses. 271 emails vanished without explanation. After importing to the new platform, only ~3,100 came through. From the original total, they lost more than 20% before sending a single email from their new system.

This isn’t a catastrophic bug. It’s the normal friction of moving data between systems: duplicate emails, incompatible formats, addresses flagged as invalid. But nobody tells you this when you hear “you can export your list whenever you want.”

The technical email setup

Molly White (Citation Needed) migrated from Substack to self-hosted Ghost. Her documentation of the process reveals the level of technical complexity involved: provisioning a server, configuring Mailgun at $75/month, setting up SPF, DMARC, DKIM, and BIMI records in DNS, and troubleshooting mass email deliveries.

Her first send was mostly failures. Emails bounced, landed in spam, or simply never arrived. It took weeks to stabilize deliverability to the level Substack gives you from day one.

For someone technical, this is tedious but manageable. For a creator who writes about culture, business, or psychology and has no DNS experience, it’s a wall.

The discovery network you lose

This is the biggest invisible cost. Substack’s recommendation network drives 50% of all new free subscribers and 25% of new paid subscribers across the platform. For smaller creators, Notes generates up to 60% of new free subscribers.

When you migrate, you lose all of that. Overnight. It’s like closing your shop in a high-traffic mall and opening one on a street where nobody walks by casually. Your content can be the same, but the source of new readers gets cut off.

Substack knows this, and it’s their strongest retention argument. One creator called it “a huge bargaining chip” that keeps many creators on the platform even when they want to leave.

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Paid Subscribers: The Most Delicate Problem

Your email list exports. Your payment relationships don’t.

Every paid subscriber needs to re-subscribe on your new platform. You need to:

1. Communicate the migration weeks in advance
2. Give clear reasons for why you’re leaving
3. Make the re-subscription process as simple as possible
4. Accept that you’re going to lose people along the way

Estimates vary, but losing between 10-30% of your paid subscribers during a migration is normal. If you have 600 paid subscribers at $8/month, that’s between 60 and 180 people, equivalent to $5,760-$17,280 in annual revenue that disappears.

If you’re considering migration and depend on subscription revenue, you need a financial plan to absorb that temporary drop.

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GDPR and Re-Consent

If you have subscribers in the European Union (and if you write in Spanish, you probably have subscribers in Spain), GDPR may require you to obtain re-consent when migrating to a new platform. This means sending an email asking them to confirm they want to keep receiving your content.

Re-consent rates are brutal. Many subscribers simply ignore the email, not because they don’t want your content, but because inbox inertia wins. Expect to lose another 20-40% of your European subscribers at this step.

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How to Migrate Without Destroying Your Newsletter

If after all this you decide migration makes sense, here’s the process that minimizes damage:

Before migrating

• Announce 4-6 weeks in advance. Use multiple posts and emails to communicate the change.
• Set up your new platform completely before sending the first email. Test deliverability with a small list.
• Set up a custom domain on Substack now if you don’t have one. This makes the URL transition cleaner.

During migration

• Export your list and review it manually. Look for missing emails, duplicates, or broken formats.
• Import in batches if your new platform allows it. It’s easier to troubleshoot problems with 500 emails than with 5,000.
• Send a “welcome email” from your new platform explaining the change and asking them to mark your address as safe.

After migrating

• Monitor open rates for the first 4 weeks. If they drop significantly, you have a deliverability problem.
• Leave your Substack active for at least 60 days with a pinned post redirecting to your new location.
• Don’t delete anything until you’re 100% sure the migration worked.

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Should You Migrate or Start Somewhere Else?

The easiest migration is the one you don’t need to make.

If you’re evaluating platforms now and know you’ll eventually want more control, analytics, or design, consider starting directly on Ghost or Beehiiv. The monthly cost may be less than the cost of migrating later.

If you’re already on Substack with a significant audience, the decision is harder. The cost of staying (10% revenue share, design and analytics limitations) versus the cost of leaving (subscriber loss, technical complexity, loss of discovery). There’s no universally right answer.

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Need Help With Your Migration?

Stuck on Substack but ready to grow? The migration process doesn’t have to cost you half your audience. Let’s talk about how to make the transition right.