The math most newsletter creators haven’t done: at $3,000/month in paid subscriptions, Substack takes $300. Every month. Ghost’s Starter plan costs $18/month and takes nothing. That’s a $282/month swing ($3,384/year) from a single platform decision.

Ghost entered the newsletter comparison conversation more seriously after two high-profile migrations in fall 2025. Alison Roman moved her 343,000-subscriber newsletter to Ghost in September. Brad Hargreaves moved his real estate newsletter Thesis Driven (the highest-grossing real estate publication on Substack) to Ghost that same month, citing Substack’s 10% cut as “really expensive” and the closed platform’s lack of API access as a deal-breaker for his growing product business.

Then in October 2025, Lyz Lenz moved to Patreon, not Ghost. But her reasons (bot subscribers, tanking open rates, flat paid conversions despite growing free subscribers) raised uncomfortable questions about what Substack’s algorithm optimizes for.

Three platforms, three fundamentally different revenue models. Here’s what you actually keep at each income level.

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The Revenue Retention Table

Which newsletter platform pays creators more?

At low revenue (under ~$900/month), Substack’s free entry keeps the most money in your pocket. Above that threshold, Ghost’s flat fee beats Substack’s 10% cut. Beehiiv’s Scale plan at $43+/month adds Boosts as a second passive revenue stream that Substack and Ghost can’t match, making it the strongest total income platform once you have a list of meaningful size.

Monthly Paid Sub Revenue	Ghost Starter ($18/mo)	Beehiiv Scale ($43/mo)	Substack (10% cut)
$500/month	$482 kept	$457 kept	$450 kept
$1,000/month	$982 kept	$957 kept	$900 kept
$3,000/month	$2,982 kept	$2,957 kept	$2,700 kept
$10,000/month	$9,982 kept	$9,957 kept	$9,000 kept

All figures exclude Stripe processing fees (~2.9% + $0.30/transaction), which apply equally across all three platforms for subscription payments.

At $500/month, Ghost narrowly wins over Substack by $32. At $10,000/month, the gap is $982/month in Ghost’s favor. Nearly the platform fee itself, kept in your pocket every month.

Beehiiv trails Ghost by $25/month at every tier because of its higher base fee, but that comparison ignores Boosts entirely. Add Boosts revenue back in and Beehiiv frequently wins on total income.

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Ghost: The 0% Cut Platform (With a Monthly Bill)

Ghost updated its pricing in July 2025. The Starter plan now runs $18/month (or $15/month on annual billing) and supports up to 500 members. Publisher is $35/month for up to 1,000 members with three staff seats.

The model is simple: pay a flat fee, keep everything your subscribers pay you. No percentage cut at any revenue level, ever.

What makes Ghost different from Beehiiv and Substack is what it’s built for. Ghost is a full publishing CMS: custom themes, full API access, webhooks, native SSO, and integrations with basically anything. That’s why Brad Hargreaves moved. His Thesis Driven operation had grown into courses, databases, and a separate investor newsletter. Substack couldn’t connect any of it. Ghost could.

The tradeoff: Ghost’s discovery network doesn’t exist. Zero built-in growth. You bring your audience to Ghost; Ghost doesn’t send you one. The platform also has a steeper setup curve than Beehiiv or Substack. You’re managing more of your publishing infrastructure yourself.

Ghost makes financial sense when:

• You’re already generating $900+/month in paid subscriptions (the Substack crossover point)
• You need API access, webhooks, or integrations your current platform can’t support
• You’re building a broader product business around your newsletter

Ghost doesn’t make sense when:

• You’re building from zero and need platform discovery to grow
• You want passive income from ad networks or recommendations (Ghost has neither)
• You don’t want to manage platform complexity

For a deeper look at how self-hosting costs and platform fees stack up across creator tools, the digital product platform comparison covers the full fee picture.

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Beehiiv: The Boosts Wildcard

Beehiiv’s Scale plan starts at $43/month for up to 1,000 subscribers and takes 0% of your paid subscription revenue. The free Launch plan supports up to 2,500 subscribers but without monetization access.

The fee math alone doesn’t explain why Beehiiv often wins on total income. Boosts does.

Boosts is Beehiiv’s paid recommendation network. Other newsletter operators pay to have their newsletters recommended to your subscribers. When someone from your list subscribes to a boosted newsletter, you earn $0.50 to $3+ per referred subscriber. You toggle the feature on and Beehiiv handles placement. No pitching, no copy to write.

The case studies are real. Matt Navarra’s Geekout Newsletter earned $25,000 in a single month via Boosts. Yaroslav Sobko’s Cyber Corsairs AI newsletter earned $65,000 over seven months combining Boosts with Beehiiv’s ad network, growing from 4,000 to 50,000 subscribers in the same period.

Those are outliers. But the floor matters too. A newsletter with 10,000 subscribers and modest engagement can realistically generate $200–600/month from Boosts passively. That revenue doesn’t require a single subscriber to pay for anything.

Add that to subscription revenue and Beehiiv’s total income frequently exceeds Ghost’s at comparable subscriber counts, even accounting for the slightly higher platform fee.

The catch with Boosts: you’re recommending newsletters to your readers. Bad placements erode trust. Beehiiv filters by category, but review what you’re recommending. The income is passive; the brand management isn’t.

Beehiiv works best when:

• You want monetization options before you’ve built a large paid subscriber base
• Your list quality and niche support Boosts payouts
• You’re growing quickly and want the ad network alongside subscription income

For the full picture on Beehiiv’s 2026 features including digital products and ad network updates, see the Beehiiv all-in-one platform review.

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Substack: Free Entry, Permanent 10% Cost

Substack’s model: free to start, 10% of subscription revenue forever. No monthly fee until you’re earning, then a cut that never decreases as you scale.

At $500/month in paid subscriptions, Substack costs less than both Ghost ($18) and Beehiiv ($43+). That math flips somewhere around $900/month. Above that, both Ghost and Beehiiv keep more of your money.

What Substack gives you in exchange for that 10%: distribution. Substack’s recommendation engine sent 32 million new subscribers to writers in Q4 2025 alone. That’s the platform routing readers already subscribed to newsletters in adjacent niches toward writers they’d likely pay for. For writers building from zero, this growth channel has no equivalent on Ghost or Beehiiv.

Substack Notes also functions as a lightweight social network within the ecosystem. A viral Note can add hundreds of subscribers from existing Substack users who cost nothing to acquire.

The Lyz Lenz migration raised a concern the fee math doesn’t capture: Substack’s algorithm may be optimizing for subscriber counts that don’t convert. She noted that thousands of her subscribers were bots or non-openers when she left, her open rates had been declining, and paid conversions were flat despite growing free subscriber numbers. The platform’s push toward Notes and social features may be pulling attention away from the paid reader relationships that actually generate income.

Substack makes sense when:

• You’re starting from zero and need discovery to build initial readership
• Your content maps to an existing Substack reader community (politics, culture, tech, finance)
• You want zero monthly cost until you’re earning subscription revenue
• Paid subscription is your sole monetization model and you’re early stage

Substack stops making sense when:

• You’re generating $3,000+/month in paid subscriptions ($300/month going to the platform)
• You want API access or integrations for a broader product business
• You want Boosts or ad network income alongside subscriptions

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The Migration Question

The creators who moved in 2025 were paying attention to the fee math, not just the feature list.

Brad Hargreaves moved to Ghost because Substack’s closed architecture made it impossible to build the product business he wanted. He cited the 10% cut as “really expensive” after reaching the highest revenue level on the platform. And then left anyway, because the platform constraints mattered more than the growth network.

Lyz Lenz moved to Patreon for a different reason. Her problem wasn’t the fee structure. It was that Substack’s platform behavior seemed to be generating subscribers who didn’t convert to paid. Within two weeks on Patreon, she’d recovered 70% of her paid subscriber revenue, suggesting the subscribers she lost in migration were the ones not paying anyway.

Two completely different migration stories. Both point to the same conclusion: the platform’s fee structure and the quality of subscribers it generates are separate questions, and both matter.

Migration carries real costs. Expect 15–25% subscriber churn during any platform move. At $3,000/month in paid subscriptions, that’s $450–750 in temporary revenue loss. The fee savings at scale typically recover that within a few months, but don’t underestimate the friction.

For more on Substack-specific monetization strategies and what works before you consider migrating, the Substack creator guide covers the paid conversion mechanics in depth.

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The Formula: Run Your Own Numbers

Platform fee math isn’t complicated once you have your numbers. Here’s the calculation:

Monthly revenue kept = Paid subscription revenue − Platform cut − Monthly platform fee

For Substack: Revenue × 0.90 For Ghost Starter: Revenue − $18 For Beehiiv Scale: Revenue − $43 (base, scales with subscriber count) + Boosts income

The crossover points:

• Ghost beats Substack at ~$180/month in paid subscriptions ($18 ÷ 0.10 = $180)
• Beehiiv Scale ($43) beats Substack at ~$430/month in paid subscriptions
• Ghost beats Beehiiv by ~$25/month at every revenue level (before Boosts)
• Beehiiv beats Ghost once Boosts income exceeds $25/month (achievable with ~500 active subscribers)

The honest version of this calculation includes realistic subscriber-to-paid conversion rates. Most newsletters convert 2–5% of free subscribers to paid. If you have 10,000 free subscribers and a 3% conversion at $10/month, that’s $3,000/month gross. The fee math above applies directly.

For a full framework on calculating whether any income stream is worth the effort, the side project profitability guide walks through the complete ROI calculation.

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Platform Risk: What the Fee Table Doesn’t Show

Beehiiv is venture-backed. They raised at a $130M+ valuation and are under pressure to grow revenue. Their Boosts network depends on other newsletter operators continuing to participate. If the network thins out, Boosts income shrinks. Plan terms can change; they’ve adjusted pricing tiers before.

Ghost is open-source. The managed Ghost Pro hosting charges the fees above, but the software itself is free. If Ghost Pro ever became unacceptable, you could self-host on your own server for infrastructure costs only. That’s a different kind of platform security than any of your other options here. Ghost.org has been running since 2013 as a non-profit foundation — structure that limits some of the aggressive monetization pressure a VC-backed company faces.

Substack’s 10% cut is sticky. It’s their revenue model. It won’t go to 0% without replacing that income elsewhere. The business model and the fee structure are the same thing.

The mitigation for all three: own your subscriber list. Export it monthly. Your list is the asset; the platform is the delivery mechanism.

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Who Should Use Which Platform

Choose Ghost if:

• You’re generating $1,000+/month in paid subscriptions and want to stop paying percentage fees
• You need API access, webhooks, or custom integrations for a broader business
• You’re an established creator migrating an existing audience (Ghost’s migration guide is thorough)
• You want the most control over your publishing infrastructure long-term

Choose Beehiiv if:

• You want multiple passive income streams from the same platform (subscriptions + Boosts + ad network)
• You’re growing quickly and want monetization options before hitting paid-subscription scale
• Your audience would tolerate newsletter recommendations in exchange for relevant content
• You’re building a media business rather than a solo writer operation

Choose Substack if:

• You’re starting from zero and need platform discovery to build initial readership
• Your content category has a strong existing Substack reader community
• You want $0/month cost until you’re earning
• Paid subscription is your only monetization model and you’re in early growth mode

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The Bottom Line

At under ~$180/month in paid subscriptions, Substack is cheapest. Above that, Ghost’s flat $18/month fee saves you money at every revenue level.

But “cheapest” and “most revenue” aren’t the same question. Beehiiv’s Boosts create a passive income stream that doesn’t require any subscriber to pay for a subscription. At meaningful list sizes, that changes the total income picture significantly, even accounting for the higher platform fee.

Ghost wins on fee efficiency and platform flexibility. Beehiiv wins on total income potential. Substack wins on discovery-driven growth from zero.

The platform you pick should match where you are right now, not the tier you’re targeting. Run the formula above with your actual numbers before deciding. Once you’ve picked a platform, pairing your newsletter with digital product sales creates a second income layer that compounds independently of your subscriber count — it’s the revenue stack most serious newsletter operators build toward. And if you want a deeper look at Beehiiv versus Substack specifically, the head-to-head comparison with real earnings data breaks down which platform pays creators more at different subscriber counts.

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Ghost Pro pricing updated July 2025. Beehiiv Scale plan pricing current as of March 2026. Substack’s 10% fee applies to subscription revenue only. Stripe processing fees (~2.9% + $0.30/transaction) apply on all three platforms for paid subscriptions and are excluded from the comparisons above. Migration churn estimates based on industry case studies; your results will vary. Platform terms change, so verify current pricing before committing.