Disclosure up front: I publish The Weekly Stack on beehiiv. That's not an endorsement so much as a data point — I picked it for reasons specific to how I monetize, and those reasons don't automatically transfer to you. By the end of this you should be able to tell whether they do.
The three platforms aren't really competing on features. They're competing on business model, and that's the only comparison that matters:
- Substack is free forever and takes 10% of your subscription revenue. You pay when you earn.
- Beehiiv charges a monthly fee that scales with your list and takes 0% of subscriptions. You pay rent regardless.
- Kit is free up to 10,000 subscribers, then charges rent, and takes 0.6% on product sales.
Everything below follows from that.
The Money, Precisely
| Substack | Beehiiv | Kit | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Free tier ceiling | Unlimited | 2,500 subs | 10,000 subs |
| Entry paid plan (1k subs) | n/a — always free | $49/mo ($43 annual) | $39/mo ($33 annual) |
| Next tier up (1k subs) | n/a | $109/mo ($96 annual) | $79/mo ($66 annual) |
| Cut of subscriptions | 10% + 2.9% + $0.30 + 0.7% | 0% (+ Stripe) | 0.6% (in 3.5% + $0.30) |
| Custom domain | $50 one-time | Free, all tiers | Paid tiers |
| Ad network | None | Yes (paid plans) | None |
One honest caveat on that table: only the 1,000-subscriber tier is confirmed directly from beehiiv's and Kit's own pricing pages. Both use JavaScript sliders, and every third-party article quoting prices at 10K or 50K subscribers disagrees with every other one — by up to $120/month in beehiiv's case. Before committing, open their pricing page and drag the slider to your actual list size. Anyone quoting you a confident number for a 50,000-subscriber plan, including me, is guessing.
The crossover point
The Substack-versus-beehiiv decision has an arithmetic answer. Substack's 10% costs you nothing at zero revenue and scales forever. Beehiiv's fee is fixed. They cross when 10% of your subscription revenue exceeds beehiiv's monthly bill — roughly $500–600/month in subscription revenue at the entry tier.
Below that, Substack is cheaper. Above it, Substack gets more expensive every month you grow, permanently. At $100,000/year in subscriptions, Substack's cut is $10,000/year against beehiiv's roughly $600.
The Lock-In Nobody Mentions
This is the part I'd want to know before choosing, and it's buried in a support doc.
Substack forces in-app purchases on iOS — their words: "To comply with Apple's App Store rules, IAP will be enabled for all paid publications in the iOS app." It's not optional. Apple takes 30% in year one, dropping to 15% after, and Substack auto-adjusts prices so your payout stays roughly the same. Fine so far.
The problem is what happens if you ever leave. Apple does not transfer subscription relationships between platforms. Substack's own FAQ states it plainly: web subscriptions migrate with full billing information, IAP subscribers don't carry over. They become free readers. Your email list exports fine — the paying relationship doesn't.
And because IAP is mandatory on every paid publication, that non-portable bloc grows for as long as you stay. You can export your list at any time, but a slice of your paying subscribers is structurally stuck. No equivalent exists on beehiiv or Kit, where Stripe connects directly to you.
Why people have actually been leaving
Around 3,000 creators moved from Substack to beehiiv over the year to April 2025, roughly a third of them in that year's first quarter. Some of that was the 2024 moderation dispute over newsletters hosting extremist content. But sportswriter Joe Posnanski's stated reason was plainer and more instructive: "When you search my stories online, you see Substack above my name… I didn't like that at all." That's a branding and SEO complaint, not a political one — and it's the one most likely to apply to you.
What Each Is Genuinely Best At
Substack: distribution you cannot buy
Substack's real product isn't the editor, it's the network. Their own published figures: the Substack Network drives 25% of paid subscriptions platform-wide, existing Substack readers are 3× more likely to pay for a new subscription, and over 25% of subscriptions originate inside their apps. Lenny Rachitsky has said 78% of his new subscribers came from other Substack newsletters recommending him.
If you are starting with no audience and no distribution, that is worth a great deal. The 10% is the price of admission to a place where readers already are. Notes and the mobile app have become genuine discovery surfaces in a way nothing beehiiv or Kit offers.
What you're giving up: SEO control, brand ownership, and the exit. Substack is a reading community that happens to send email. Your publication lives inside their brand.
Beehiiv: the operator's choice
Beehiiv treats a newsletter as a media business rather than a writing community, and the feature set follows. You get a real website with real SEO control — customizable titles, meta descriptions, URLs — which matters enormously if search traffic is part of your plan. Custom domains are free on every tier including the free one, which is a pointed contrast with Substack's $50 gate.
The monetization stack is the differentiator. The Ad Network matches sponsors to your newsletter automatically — you pick up to three tags, write a description, and get matched. Payment is CPM (per 1,000 unique opens) or CPC (per verified click), set by the advertiser, with payouts on the 20th of each month. Beehiiv reportedly pays out over $1 million a month to publishers across the network. There's no published subscriber minimum; the gate is being on a paid plan and having Stripe Express available in your country.
Boosts — now folded into Recommendations — is the other half: a marketplace where you pay other newsletters a per-subscriber bounty to recommend you, or get paid to recommend others. Beehiiv takes 20%, already baked into the displayed price, so a $2.50 CPA nets the publisher $2.00. Benchmark acquisition cost runs around $1.63 per subscriber. Subscribers go through a verification window, and you're not charged for the ones that fail.
The catch, and it's a real one: the free tier can't monetize at all. Ad Network, paid recommendations, 0% on subscriptions, digital products, automations — all require Scale or above. Beehiiv's free tier is a trial, not a home.
Kit: the one that isn't really a newsletter platform
Kit (formerly ConvertKit) is an email marketing automation tool wearing a creator-friendly coat, and that's its advantage. Tag-based segmentation and visual automations are meaningfully better than either competitor. If your newsletter is one channel in a business that also sells courses, coaching, or digital products, Kit is built for that and the others aren't.
Its 2025 repricing made it the best free tier in the category by a distance: 10,000 subscribers free, and you can sell digital products on it — something beehiiv's free tier explicitly cannot do. The same repricing more than doubled entry pricing and raised costs 58–101% for creators in the 15K–50K band, so the generosity is deliberately front-loaded.
Two other things worth knowing. Kit is bootstrapped, roughly a $300M business with no VC exit pressure — against Substack's $200M raised at a $1.1B valuation. That's a real platform-risk difference. And in May 2026 they shipped an Email MCP server, letting you analyze your audience and draft broadcasts from inside Claude or ChatGPT. First mover among the three on agent-native email, and if you've read my MCP piece you'll know why that's more than a gimmick.
Where it loses: weakest website and SEO of the three, no ad network, no discovery, and the most expensive at 50,000 subscribers.
The Decision
Pick by how you plan to make money, not by feature list
Paid subscriptions, no existing audience → Substack. The network genuinely supplies a quarter of paid subscriptions. Pay the 10% for distribution you can't otherwise buy. Understand that the iOS subscriber bloc is not portable, and decide whether you can live with that before you build on it.
Sponsorships and search traffic → beehiiv. Real website, real SEO, 0% on subscriptions, an ad network that pays without you selling, and a CPA marketplace for buying growth. Budget for Scale from day one — the free tier can't monetize.
Newsletter as one channel in a product business → Kit. 10,000 free subscribers with product sales included is unmatched, the automation is the best of the three, and bootstrapped ownership means less platform risk.
Paid subscriptions above ~$600/month → leave Substack. The 10% compounds against you permanently, and it only gets more expensive as you succeed.
What I'd Tell Someone Starting Today
Start on Kit's free tier if you're genuinely at zero. Ten thousand subscribers of runway with digital product sales included is the most generous offer in the category, and it costs nothing to find out whether you'll actually keep publishing — which is the real question at the start, not which platform has better analytics.
Move deliberately once you know your model. If sponsorship revenue is the plan, beehiiv's ad network is the strongest built-in monetization of the three and worth the rent. If you're building an audience from scratch and selling subscriptions, Substack's distribution advantage is real and the 10% is rational — just go in knowing what the iOS lock-in means.
I'm on beehiiv because this site is SEO-driven, the newsletter is sponsorship-shaped rather than subscription-shaped, and I wanted my own domain and my own brand above my own name. Different answer to a different question — which is the entire point of the exercise.