How to Make Money on Substack: My $267K Breakdown

That screenshot above is my actual Substack dashboard: $267,537 in gross annualized revenue, 1,917 paid subscribers, 42,047 total subscribers, Top 20 Business bestseller.

I’m showing you the receipts up front because “how to make money on Substack” articles are usually written by people who… haven’t. And because the numbers come with an honest asterisk: the audience took me three years to build.

The revenue, though? Most of that showed up in a 12-to-15-month sprint once all the pieces were in place. No ads, no funding, no famous co-sign. A laptop and a publishing schedule.

You make money on Substack through paid subscriptions first — readers paying monthly or annually — plus founding tiers, and, if you’re smart about it, the services, clients, and books your newsletter quietly sells for you. Here’s how each piece actually works, with real math.

The Revenue Formula (Simpler than You Want It to Be)

Newsletter revenue is three numbers multiplied together: free subscribers × conversion rate × price. That’s it. That’s the whole spreadsheet. Mine converts roughly one in twenty free readers to paid. Double any of the three numbers and you double revenue — but the free list is the lever with the highest ceiling, which is why I always point people to growth before monetization.

What Substack Takes

Substack is free to use and takes 10% of your paid revenue, plus payment processing (Stripe’s cut, roughly another 3%). So a $100,000 subscription year nets out around $87,000 before taxes. Does the 10% sting at scale? Yes.

Is it buying you the recommendation network, hosting, payments, and a reader base already trained to pay for newsletters? Also yes. My full feelings on that trade are in Is Substack Worth It in 2026?.

Stream #1: Paid Subscriptions

The engine. A paid tier with its own promise, strategic paywalls, launches with deadlines, and regular (yes, regular) upgrade asks. I wrote the entire conversion playbook in How to Get Paid Subscribers on Substack, so I won’t repeat it here — but that post is the “how” behind every dollar in the screenshot above.

Stream #2: Founding Tiers

Substack lets readers pay a higher “founding member” price, and a surprising number of people will — especially if you attach something personal: a call, a manuscript review, early access. Founding tiers quietly raise your average revenue per subscriber without adding a single post to your workload. Turn them on. Make them mean something.

Stream #3: the Newsletter as Storefront

Here’s the part most “make money on Substack” posts miss entirely: the subscription doesn’t have to be the whole business. It can be the front door to one. My newsletters send readers to my books. My visibility on Substack brings me ghostwriting clients and Substack consulting work.

A few thousand engaged readers who trust you is a client pipeline most businesses would kill for — and depending on what you sell, this stream can out-earn your subscriptions even with a fraction of my list size.

Stream #4: Serialized and Creative Work

Fiction writers, this one’s ours: serialization is having a real renaissance on Substack. I serialize novels on my second publication, Sutoscience, where an unfolding story gives readers a reason to subscribe — and upgrade — today. The same mechanic works for a course, a challenge, or a book written in public.

The Honest Timeline (Read This Before You Quit Your Day Job)

My revenue sprint happened in years two and three, not month two. A more typical honest arc: months one through six, you’re building the free list and finding your cadence. You go paid somewhere in months three to nine.

Meaningful revenue — a few thousand a month — tends to arrive as your free list crosses into five figures. Slow is normal. Compounding is real. The writers who lose aren’t the slow ones — they’re the ones who quit during act one.

The Math for Your Newsletter

At $10/month: 100 paid subscribers ≈ $12,000/year gross. 500 ≈ $60,000. 850 ≈ six figures. Work backwards from your goal: at a 5% conversion rate, six figures means roughly 17,000 free subscribers. Which is exactly why the growth playbook comes first and the paywall comes second.

Want Help Building Your Version of This?

Positioning, launch, paid strategy, the whole engine — that’s my Substack consulting intensive. I only take on newsletters I genuinely believe can work, which is exactly what the free discovery call is for.

Tell me about your newsletter below — this form lands straight in my inbox — or go read more about my Substack consulting first. Either way, it starts with a free discovery call. No pitch decks, no weirdness. Just two writers talking about your thing.