How to leave Substack in 10 easy steps

So you want to leave Substack but you’re not sure how to take your posts and your audience with you and maybe you’re a little worried your growth will slow down.

Don’t worry! Substack’s analytics are lying to you about how many people found you here. Your best promotion is your fans and other publishers and those are all people, not platforms.

How to leave in 10 easy steps

1. Choose your destination

Good alternatives include Ghost, beehiiv, Kit and Buttondown.

Choose Ghost if you care most about your website design and want full control of that and if you primarily want to monetize with subscriptions or ads.

Choose beehiiv if you want to monetize with ads (subscriptions work here too). (Note that this is my affiliate link)

Choose Kit if you’re worried about missing recommendations and/or if you want more of an email marketing tool.

Choose Buttondown if you need something lightweight and easy to set up. Their web archive isn’t great but their newsletters are nice and the platform has everything you need on the newsletter side.

2. Email your chosen destination to see if they will help you migrate

Most of them will!

3. Set up your new tool

Add your colors, logo and domain name. Set up the layout or choose your theme.

What this set up entails will depend on where you go. Check their documentation.

4. Export posts and subscribers from Substack

Go to your publication settings and download the full package.

5. Import to your new tool

If your destination won’t assist with migration, see if they have self-serve importers. All the ones I mentioned do so you upload the zip file and it gets unpacked and remapped to your new landing space.

I recently did this migration with Ghost and it even downloaded and uploaded all the images to the new place. The posts look mostly great minus a couple minor clean up tasks.

6. Migrate your paid subscribers

If you have paid subscribers, you’ll need the receiving platform OR Stripe to migrate subscriptions over. If you’re techy, you can follow the steps in Stripe’s dashboard and run the migration yourself but after looking at that, I decided it was easier to ask for help—and luckily it is available!

Your free subscribers (all subscribers actually) are in the export bundle so they’re already loaded in if you ran the import or had a team help you.

Make sure you email Substack and have them remove their 10% cut. Otherwise, you’ll keep paying them in the new location for no reason.

7. Tell your readers on Substack that you’re moving

I recommend giving them a heads up as soon as you decide your timeline, maybe a month or less before you move. Make sure to let paid subscribers know a couple times because their billing will now exist in a new place (wherever you move.)

Put up a goodbye post when you do make the switch and change your subscribe and about pages to point to the new site, especially if you weren’t using a custom domain on Substack. You can either leave your publication up or delete it. You can always move new subscribers over by setting up an automation or downloading them periodically.

8. Contact your recommendations partners

One of the big reasons people like Substack is “the network.” The network is just people! Talk to them! Ask your fellow publishers if they’ll continue to trade cross-promotion with you. Y’all don’t need a sketch opt in widget. Just toss a couple mentions of each other in your newsletters. Or include each other in your welcome emails. There’s lots of great ways to cross-promote!

9. Set up proper welcome flows

Once your basics are in, make sure you pull over your free and paid welcome email. On other platforms you’ll have way more options to actually extend these into full sequences that encourage reading and upgrading or properly onboard new paid members. There’s tons you can automate when you leave Substack and have access to either built in automation tools or Zapier using the public APIs every tool that’s not Substack has.

Note that if you switch to Ghost, you’ll need Outpost for this.

10. Celebrate your freedom

You did it. You’re free of this intellectual property theft machine. You can rest easy knowing your work and your audience is safe away from the Peter Thiel brigade. I’m sending you a high five!

If you’re wondering how to find your best promotion channels and how to grow your paid subscriber base, I write about that every week in Journalists Pay Themselves and Revenue Rulebreaker. Come hang.