Who Takes a Cut of Your Reader Payments

A monthly subscription fee has a ceiling. A revenue share does not, and that is the entire reason it belongs at the top of any comparison rather than in a footnote.

If you charge readers for a newsletter, the percentage a platform takes out of those payments will eventually be the largest number in your relationship with it. Most comparison tables treat it as a feature bullet, level with whether the editor supports polls. It is not a feature. It is a second pricing model running alongside the first one, and on one popular platform it is the only pricing model there is.

What each platform takes

Read from each vendor's own published terms on 19 September 2026, except where noted.

• Substack — 10% of gross subscription revenue. Payment processing through Stripe sits on top of that at roughly 3%, so a publisher keeps something close to 87% of what readers pay. There is no plan that reduces it.
• Kit — 3.5% plus 30 cents per transaction on digital products and paid subscriptions, on every plan including free. Kit states that this figure already includes credit-card processing, and that its own share of it is 0.6%.
• beehiiv — 0% platform take on paid subscriptions, on Scale and Max. Payment processing still applies separately.
• Ghost — nothing taken from reader payments, from the $29-a-month tier upward. The cheaper $18 tier cannot process paid subscriptions at all, so it is not an option here.
• MailerLite — no transaction fee for digital products is stated on the pricing page.
• Buttondown — paid subscriptions are available in the $9-a-month add-on tier. No revenue-share figure is published, and this site will not invent one.

Two of those entries are absences rather than numbers, and they are recorded as absences deliberately. A comparison table that fills every cell is more satisfying to read and less useful to rely on.

The stacking problem

The most common error in comparing these figures is treating them as though they measure the same thing. They do not, because some of them include payment processing and some do not.

Substack's 10% is a platform fee. Stripe's processing is charged on top of it. So a $10 monthly subscription loses $1 to Substack and roughly 59 cents to Stripe, and the publisher receives about $8.41.

Kit's 3.5% plus 30 cents is a combined figure. On that same $10 subscription the total deduction is 65 cents, of which Kit's own portion is about 6 cents and the rest is card processing. The publisher receives about $9.35.

Line those up as "10% versus 3.5%" and you conclude that Kit is roughly three times cheaper. Line them up correctly, after processing, and the gap on a $10 subscription is 94 cents a month per subscriber — closer to five times. The direction is the same; the magnitude is not, and the magnitude is what you budget on.

The general rule: before comparing any two percentages in this category, establish whether each one is quoted before or after card processing. If a platform does not say, assume processing is extra.

Where a flat fee overtakes a percentage

A percentage has no ceiling, so any flat monthly fee will eventually be cheaper. The only question is where the lines cross, and that is arithmetic you can do in a minute.

Take Substack's 10% against beehiiv's entry Scale rate of $43 a month, where the platform's take on paid subscriptions is zero.

• At $200 a month in gross subscription revenue, Substack takes $20 and beehiiv charges $43. Substack is cheaper by $23.
• At $430 a month, Substack takes $43. The two are level.
• At $1,000 a month, Substack takes $100 against beehiiv's $43. beehiiv is cheaper by $57.
• At $3,000 a month, Substack takes $300 against $43. The gap is $257 every month, or more than $3,000 a year.

That $430 crossing point is arithmetic on two verified numbers: Substack's published 10% and beehiiv's published entry Scale price. It is not a universal figure — beehiiv's rate rises with your list size, so the true crossing point moves up as you grow, and you should redo the sum with the actual tier price your list size produces. But the shape is reliable, and the shape is the thing: below a few hundred dollars a month in reader revenue, percentage pricing wins. Above it, permanently, flat pricing does.

Why this is the buried number

Consider the incentives. A platform charging a monthly fee wants you to compare monthly fees, because that is a small, familiar number and it competes on it. A platform charging a percentage wants you to compare setup effort, because zero is a very attractive monthly fee and the percentage only bites later.

Neither is lying. Both are choosing which number goes on the landing page. The result is that the single largest cost in running a paid newsletter is systematically the hardest one to find, and the moment it becomes expensive is the moment you are most locked in — you have a paying readership, billing relationships through a processor, and an archive at a set of URLs.

That is why this site puts the cut in the main table on the best newsletter platforms rate card rather than in a footnote. It is also why the two unknowns above stay marked as unknown.

The fees that are not the subscription fee

One more layer, because platforms increasingly earn from creators in ways that sit outside the subscription cut entirely.

Kit runs a Paid Recommendations programme, where publishers earn by recommending other newsletters to their subscribers. Kit's fee on those earnings is 23.5% — a very different number from the 3.5% commerce fee, applied to a different revenue line, and easy to conflate with it if you read quickly.

beehiiv's approach is structurally similar and priced differently: the ad network and the sponsorship storefront are features of the Scale and Max plans rather than separate revenue shares, so what you pay for access to them is the monthly subscription you were already paying.

Neither arrangement is hidden, and neither is unreasonable — a marketplace that finds you advertisers has done work that deserves paying for. The point is that "what does this platform take from my revenue" has more than one answer on most of these services, and the subscription percentage is only the one that gets compared. If a meaningful share of your income will come through a platform's own marketplace rather than direct subscriptions, find that number too.

What to do before you turn on payments

Four things, in order.

1. Find the number in writing. Not from a comparison site, including this one. From the vendor's own pricing or terms page, and if it is not there, from support, in an email you keep.
2. Establish whether processing is included. This changes the comparison by a factor of two or more, as above.
3. Do the crossing-point sum at your realistic revenue. Not today's revenue — the revenue you expect in eighteen months, because switching later is expensive in a way switching now is not.
4. Check what happens to paying subscribers if you leave. Subscription billing relationships generally live with your payment processor rather than the newsletter platform, but the mechanics of transferring them vary, and on at least one platform subscriptions bought through a mobile app do not survive the move. The migration mechanics are covered in moving a newsletter list without losing half of it.

The summary

For a newsletter earning a few hundred dollars a month from readers, a percentage is cheap and a monthly fee is an overhead you have not earned yet. Substack's 10% is an entirely reasonable price for that situation, and its zero-cost free tier is the reason it appears on this site at all.

For a newsletter earning thousands, a percentage is the most expensive thing on the invoice, it grows exactly as fast as your success does, and no amount of feature comparison outweighs it. At that point the platforms taking nothing — beehiiv from Scale upward, Ghost from its $29 tier upward — are not competing on features. They are competing on arithmetic, and they win it.