Substack vs WordPress: page one is written by companies selling self-hosting, so we did the fee maths ourselves

Every fee, price and help-centre answer below was read from the company’s own page on 30 October 2026. The Google results were captured the same morning on google.co.uk.

Short answer: Substack costs nothing until you charge, then keeps 10% of every paid subscription on top of Stripe’s card and billing fees. A self-hosted WordPress site paired with Kit’s free email plan costs a UK writer about £171 a year including VAT, and Kit’s fee on paid newsletters is 3.5% + 20p. On standard UK cards that leaves you 8.7p more of every pound a reader pays, so on a £5 payment you keep £4.63 against £4.19 on Substack, about 10% more money. The running cost pays for itself at about £1,971 a year of subscription revenue, which is 33 readers paying £5 a month. Below that, or if your newsletter is free, Substack is cheaper. Before you read any other comparison, know who wrote it. On page one for this search, the six articles below a Reddit thread all come from companies selling WordPress products or a service for running your own site.

Who wrote page one for “substack vs wordpress”

Before we priced anything, we checked who is giving the advice. We searched google.co.uk for “substack vs wordpress” and two close variants (“substack or wordpress for blogging” and “is substack better than wordpress”) and recorded every organic result. Across the three searches, eight distinct pages appeared, seven on each, under an AI Overview. The head term itself showed a Reddit thread and six articles; Themeisle’s article appeared only on “substack or wordpress for blogging”.

Then we opened each page and applied our Stake Test. It runs three checks on any piece of tool advice: hover the links, look above the first recommendation, and ask who owns the site. Where a link went through a redirect, we followed it and read the parameters on the page it landed on.

Across the three searches that is seven distinct articles and seven financial stakes, all pointing away from Substack. Six publishers sell WordPress hosting, plugins or themes. The seventh, Distribb, sells a writing service for people who run their own website, whether on WordPress, Webflow or Shopify. None of the seven articles is by Substack or a Substack writer, and none links to Substack through a referral programme. We call this pattern the one-sided page one: every article has a stake, and every stake points the same way, towards running your own site.

None of that makes the articles wrong. Several are careful and fair to Substack. It does mean none of these publishers has a reason to tell you that Substack is the cheaper choice for a small or free newsletter, and on the numbers below it often is.

What the Stake Test turned up on each page

The three checks gave clean answers here.

First, the links. Only one of the seven articles carried an affiliate link. Themeisle’s Bluehost link points to a path on Themeisle’s own domain. We followed it and it landed on a Bluehost offer page with Impact partner parameters, including utm_medium=affiliate and a campaign named after Vertigo Studio SA, Themeisle’s company. The other six vendor pages link to their own products, which is the stake.

Second, the space above the first recommendation. Themeisle tells readers in the text, beside the link, that the Bluehost links are affiliate links. The vendors do not need a disclosure for linking to themselves, and none of them added one.

Third, ownership. This is where the whole page one sorts itself. Automattic’s own homepage lists Pressable among its products, alongside WordPress.com and WooCommerce. WP Engine, Liquid Web and InstaWP sell WordPress hosting. Gravity Forms and Themeisle sell WordPress add-ons.

The “substack vs self-hosted blog” variant looks different. That search returns writers and web designers: two writers who publish on Substack, a blogger with disclosed affiliate links, and two studios that build websites. One of those studios, Charlotte Duckworth Studio, links to Squarespace through a partner link we followed to Squarespace’s own sign-up page. The full table for all four searches is in our page-one data file.

What Substack takes from a paid subscription

Substack’s help article on cost, updated on 29 October 2026, is short. Publishing is free at any list size. If you switch on paid subscriptions, Substack keeps 10% of subscription revenue and Stripe charges its own processing fees on top. Readers on the web pay the price you set. Subscriptions bought in Substack’s iOS app are in-app purchases through Apple and may cost readers more to cover Apple’s fees; Substack bases its 10% on your web price.

Substack’s article lists Stripe’s US rates. A UK writer with a UK Stripe account pays Stripe’s UK rates, which we read from Stripe’s UK pricing page the same day.

The £5 working: 10% of £5 is 50p. Stripe’s card fee is 1.5% of £5 (7.5p) plus 20p, so 27.5p. Billing is 0.7% of £5, or 3.5p. That adds up to 81p, so you keep £4.19.

Card mix moves this. Stripe’s UK page lists premium UK cards at 2.8% + 20p, European cards at 2.5% + 20p and other international cards at 3.15% + 20p, plus 2% when currency conversion is needed. A newsletter with many overseas readers will pay Stripe more on Substack than our example shows. Kit quotes a flat 3.5% + 20p in pounds and calls it the only cost of selling; we have not verified how Kit treats premium or overseas cards.

Substack’s payouts article mentions one more thing that can lower what you receive. A feature called Boost may offer engaged free readers a 20% discount on a paid plan, and you can switch it off in settings.

What a self-hosted WordPress newsletter costs to run

A WordPress site does not send newsletters well on its own, so a fair comparison needs three parts: hosting, a domain and an email tool. We priced each at its renewal rate. An introductory price only lasts for the first term, and the renewal is what you pay every year after.

For hosting we used Hostinger’s Premium plan, because it is the cheapest plan in our Hostinger price log. On 30 October its UK page showed Premium renewing at £10.99 a month, and its US page showed $10.99. That renewal rate applies after the first term; the introductory price is for a 48-month term paid up front. Our break-even uses the renewal rate, so for the first four years it overstates the cost of WordPress and is on the cautious side. The US figure matches the renewal rate in our log from 4 September. The UK page states that its prices exclude VAT. (The introductory price on both pages carried a partner coupon from an earlier click in our browser. That is one more reason we only use renewal rates.)

For email we used Kit, because its free plan covers up to 10,000 subscribers and includes paid newsletters. Our Kit price log and Kit’s pricing page both show the free plan covering 10,000 subscribers, and Kit’s page lists paid newsletters on every plan, free included. Kit’s help centre says “the 3.5% + $0.30 per transaction is the only cost of selling through Kit”, and its currency page calls it a “processing fee”. In pounds it is 3.5% + £0.20. Stripe processes the payments.

Our older guide to what a self-hosted blog costs gives $80 to $150 a year after the first year. Today’s US total of $151.87 sits just above the top of that range, because both the hosting and the domain are priced at renewal.

The break-even, worked out in full

The fixed part of each fee is the same on both routes: 20p per payment in the UK and 30 cents in the US. So the difference between them is a flat percentage of your revenue, whatever price you charge.

1. Work out the UK gap per pound of revenue. Substack takes 10% + 1.5% + 0.7% = 12.2% plus 20p. Kit takes 3.5% plus 20p. The gap is 12.2% minus 3.5%, or 8.7 percentage points: 8.7p of every pound.
2. Take the UK running cost: £171.44 a year including VAT, from the table above.
3. Divide one by the other. £171.44 divided by 0.087 is £1,970.57 of gross subscription revenue a year.
4. Convert to readers. At £5 a month each reader pays £60 a year, so £1,970.57 divided by £60 is 32.8. The 33rd paying reader tips it. At £50 a year it is 39.4, so 40 readers.
5. Repeat for the US. The gap is 13.6% minus 3.5%, or 10.1 percentage points. $151.87 divided by 0.101 is $1,503.66, or 26 readers at $5 a month.

If you are VAT-registered and reclaim the VAT on hosting, use the £142.87 figure. Break-even then falls to £1,642.18, or 28 readers at £5 a month.

Two other set-ups change the answer, so here they are with the same working.

The plugin route keeps Stripe’s fees identical on both sides, so Substack’s 10% is the whole gap. We have not priced a specific membership plugin, and some charge a licence or their own transaction fee, so treat 29 readers as a floor. The Kit Creator rows use the yearly prices in our Kit vs beehiiv comparison, logged on 3 October. Kit’s page showed the same $390 at 1,000 subscribers today. Creator adds automations, but the free plan already sends newsletters and sells subscriptions, so you only need Creator if you want those extras.

If you would pay Substack’s $50 for a custom domain anyway, you are buying a domain on both routes. Take the domain out of the WordPress side and the UK break-even drops to £1,819.08 (£158.26 divided by 0.087), or 31 readers at £5 a month.

If your newsletter is free

Then Substack costs £0 and the WordPress route costs £171.44 a year in the UK. There is no fee to save, so the break-even never arrives.

What the £171 buys you is control: your own domain from day one, your own theme, full access to the site’s SEO settings and every plugin you want. Whether that is worth about £14 a month depends on how much of your traffic you expect from search. If most readers will come from email, social posts and Substack’s own recommendations, the free route is hard to argue with. If you want posts to rank on Google for years, our pages on free blogging platforms and WordPress.com vs WordPress.org cover the trade-offs in more depth.

What you own on Substack, and what you can take with you

Substack’s help centre is direct on this. Its export article opens with the line that anything you publish on Substack is yours to own. Here is what its own docs say you can do, read on 30 October.

• Settings, then Exports, produces a zip file of your posts, subscriber list and related statistics.
• The Subscribers page exports your email list as a CSV, with either all columns or just the visible ones.
• Paid subscriptions taken on the web run through a Stripe account you connect and manage; iOS in-app purchases go through Apple. Substack recommends creating a new Stripe account just for your publication. To delete a paid publication you first turn off paid subscriptions and disconnect Stripe.
• A custom domain costs a one-time $50, with no VAT or sales tax, and you must already own the domain. Substack does not sell domains.
• Under a draft post’s Settings, an “SEO Options” panel lets you edit the URL slug, up to 48 characters. Sitemaps and Google Search Console verification “become available as your publication grows”, according to Substack’s SEO article. Its main advice for ranking is to earn more inbound links.
• A privacy toggle tells AI tools not to train on your posts. Substack’s article warns that blocking training may limit how often your work shows up in AI search tools.

On WordPress you hold the files, the database and the server settings, so there is nothing to export or unlock. The trade is that the upkeep is yours too, from updates to backups, unless you pay a host to handle it.

Moving from Substack to WordPress

If you start on Substack and outgrow it, the move uses the exports above. Download the zip from Settings and Exports, then bring the posts into WordPress. WP Engine’s page on our list links to a free Substack importer plugin on WordPress.org. Import the subscriber CSV into your email tool, and point your domain at the new host if you used one on Substack. Our guide to moving a free blog to self-hosted covers redirects and the order of steps.

Paid subscribers are the delicate part. Web subscribers are billed through your Stripe account, while anyone who subscribed in Substack’s iOS app paid through Apple. We have not run this migration, so check the current instructions from your new email or membership tool before you switch anything off.

Which one we would pick

We would choose on two numbers: what you will charge, and where readers will find you.

• A free newsletter whose readers mostly arrive from email and social posts: Substack. It costs nothing, and its network can send you readers.
• A paid newsletter earning under about £2,000 a year: Substack, which is cheaper on fees alone by the working above.
• A paid newsletter above that line: WordPress plus Kit Free, which keeps more of each payment, and the gap grows with revenue. At £10,000 a year the 8.7-point gap is worth £870, set against £171 of running costs.
• A plan that depends on search traffic: WordPress, because the SEO controls are yours from the first post. Pair it with a list from day one of the blog.

Prices change, and we keep the hosting and email figures on our dated pricing pages. If a fee here moves, the break-even moves with it, and the working above shows exactly where.

Frequently asked questions

These are the questions people search for next, answered from the same pages we read on 30 October 2026.

How much does Substack take from paid subscriptions?

Substack keeps 10% of each subscription payment. Stripe also charges card processing (1.5% + 20p on standard UK cards, 2.9% + 30c on US cards) and a 0.7% Billing fee on recurring payments. On a £5 monthly subscription paid with a standard UK card, that is 81p in total.

Is Substack better than WordPress?

For a free newsletter, Substack is cheaper, since it costs nothing. For a paid newsletter, a WordPress site with Kit’s free plan keeps 8.7p more of every pound a UK reader pays. It covers its running costs at about £1,971 a year of subscription revenue, or 33 readers at £5 a month.

Can I export my subscribers from Substack?

Yes. Substack’s help centre says Settings, then Exports, creates a zip file of your posts, subscriber list and statistics, and the Subscribers page can export the list as a CSV file.

Does Substack charge for a custom domain?

Yes, a one-time fee of $50, with no VAT or sales tax added. The fee does not include the domain itself, which you buy from a registrar.

How much does a self-hosted WordPress newsletter cost in the UK?

About £171.44 a year including VAT. That uses Hostinger Premium’s renewal rate of £10.99 a month (charged after the first term), a .co.uk domain at £10.99 a year and Kit’s free plan for up to 10,000 subscribers.

Method and limits

We captured the Google results on 30 October 2026 from a UK browser with English and UK settings. One search was read from the rendered results page and the other three from the results HTML in the same session, so the order may differ slightly from what you see. We opened every article result and read its links; the forum and social results (Reddit, Hacker News and Facebook) were recorded but not audited. Affiliate status is only claimed where we followed the link and read the landing page. Our worked example assumes standard domestic cards and monthly billing. We did not check whether Substack or Kit add VAT to their own fees for UK writers, so a VAT-registered writer should check their invoices.

The page-one table, the fee inputs and the break-even working are available as CSV files, and we update the prices on our pricing pages when vendors change them.

Sources

• Substack help centre: How much does Substack cost?; custom domain setup; exporting posts; exporting your email list; SEO; editing a post URL; Stripe setup; payouts; deleting a publication; AI training setting.
• Payments: Stripe UK pricing and Stripe US pricing.
• Email: Kit pricing; Kit help on selling with Kit and fees by currency.
• Hosting and domains: Hostinger UK WordPress hosting, US WordPress hosting, UK domains and US domains.
• Ownership: Automattic (lists Pressable).
• Page-one articles audited: Gravity Forms; WP Engine; Distribb; InstaWP; Liquid Web; Pressable; Themeisle; Reddit r/Wordpress.