Substack features: what you get on each plan

Every other feature page on this site answers the same question: which plan unlocks this. Substack breaks the question. There is one plan, it costs nothing, and the gating happens on four axes instead: whether Stripe is connected, whether your list has crossed a subscriber threshold, whether you have paid a one-off fee, and whether the feature exists at all. The From plan column below records that, not a tier name.

Feature matrix

Feature by feature

Substack subscriptions

Paid subscriptions exist on every publication and cost nothing to switch on. The only prerequisite the help centre names is a connected Stripe account, set up from the Payments section of your settings. Once it clears, three subscription shapes are available: monthly, yearly, and a founding member annual plan where the reader chooses an amount above your standard tiers. Substack states plainly that it does not offer a yearly-only option, so every publication that sells annually also sells monthly.

The floor is fixed and it is not yours to set: $5 per month and $30 per year are the minimum prices, with the note that other currencies may vary. That is higher than most creators expect, and it is the single constraint that decides whether a low-price, high-volume publication can exist here at all.

What you pay for the privilege is a revenue share rather than a subscription: 10% of each transaction to Substack, plus Stripe on top. The arithmetic belongs on the pricing tab, not here. The feature itself is the fastest paid setup in this corpus, because there is no plan to upgrade to first.

Substack notes

Notes are short-form posts published to your Substack profile and surfaced to subscribers in the Home feed. The detail most comparisons miss is in the help centre sentence itself: any creator or reader on Substack can start a note, and a publication is not required. Notes is therefore not a publication feature that you unlock; it is an account feature that exists before you have a newsletter at all.

It behaves like a social network rather than an email tool, which has two consequences worth knowing before you build a strategy on it. First, a note cannot be paywalled. You can restrict replies to paid subscribers, but the note itself is public. Second, distribution is Substack’s to grant: the feed decides who sees a note, which is the opposite of the guarantee email gives you.

For anyone evaluating Substack as an email platform, Notes is the clearest illustration of where the company has been investing. It is also the reason a Substack publication grows differently from a list you own.

Substack podcast

Podcast hosting is included on every publication with no storage tier and no episode cap documented. You can upload an MP3, WAV or AAC file, or record audio directly in the publication, and every episode automatically receives an AI-generated transcript rendered as collapsible text. You can edit that transcript, upload your own .txt, .srt or .vtt file, and assign speakers by hand.

Episodes can be set to a paid-subscribers-only audience, with a free preview available to everyone, and distribution runs to Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, TuneIn and Pocket Casts. Paid distribution on Spotify has its own documented path, which matters because most newsletter platforms that bolt on audio cannot deliver a private paid feed at all.

The gap is measurement. Substack maintains a dedicated help article on whether its podcast analytics are IAB certified, which tells you the question comes up often enough to need an answer. Treat podcast numbers here as directional if you sell sponsorship against them.

Substack chat

Chat is a space for hosting conversations with your subscribers, and the help centre is specific about who gets in: only subscribers can access a publication’s chat. There is no public mode. By default only publication contributors can start a thread, though the setting can be changed to let subscribers open discussions themselves.

A second layer sits underneath. You can restrict replies to paid subscribers, in which case free subscribers see a lock screen rather than the conversation. That makes Chat one of the few genuinely subscriber-gated surfaces on Substack, and the closest thing the platform offers to a community product.

Chat and Notes are routinely confused, to the point that Substack publishes an article whose entire purpose is separating them. The distinction that matters operationally: Notes is public and algorithmic, Chat is private and list-based. If you are choosing a retention tool, Chat is the one that only reaches people who already subscribed.

Substack templates

There is no email template editor on Substack and no template gallery, and this is the one line in the matrix where the honest answer is a flat no. Roughly 170 people a month search for Substack templates; what they find is a design system, not templates.

What exists is a Website editor with a Custom theme setting. Inside it you pick fonts for post titles and post bodies, choose whether links appear underlined or coloured, set a background colour and an accent colour for elements like the Subscribe button, and upload a logo at a minimum of 256 x 256 pixels and a wordmark at 1344 x 256. Header layout has four options, Standard, Wide, Hamburger and Inline. None of it is code: the help centre documents preset selection only, with no mention of uploading a font or writing CSS.

Email itself is even more fixed. You can set header and footer content separately for free and paid subscribers and upload a banner image at around 1100 x 220, and banners appear in emails but not on posts. Everything else about the email shell is Substack’s.

Substack custom domain

A custom domain costs a one-time $50 and is the only genuine paywall on the feature list. Pay it once and your publication answers on your own hostname instead of a substack.com subdomain.

What the fee does not buy is the part most people assume. The help centre states it directly, and it was last confirmed on 29 April 2026: newsletters will always be sent from an @substack.com address. Your domain changes where readers land, not where mail comes from. There is no SPF record to publish, no DKIM key to rotate, no DMARC policy to set, because none of the sending happens on your domain. Reputation stays pooled with every other publication on the platform, and if placement degrades you have no lever to pull.

The comparison worth making is with beehiiv, where a custom domain on the free plan doubles as an authenticated sending domain with DMARC required. Same feature name, a different thing entirely.

Substack paywall

The paywall is per-post rather than per-section, and it is set from the post’s audience field: everyone, all subscribers, or paid subscribers only. Once Stripe is connected there is nothing further to enable.

The more interesting mechanic is the partial paywall. On video posts you can select a portion of the video to give away free, and on podcasts you can publish a free version of a paid episode. The help centre calls these flexible paywalls, and they let a paid post do acquisition work instead of simply disappearing behind a wall.

One boundary catches people out when they start using segments. Publishing a post and notifying only a segment does not restrict who can read it: the post stays publicly visible, and the segment only controls who gets the email. Audience and notification are two different settings, and only the first one gates access.

Substack recommendations

Recommendations let creators promote one another, and the mechanism is reciprocal by design: you promote a publication to your audience, and its creator is prompted to recommend you back. The help centre names no limit on how many publications you can recommend and no cost, and it does not condition the feature on having paid subscriptions enabled.

Two adjacent surfaces extend it. Recommendations digests bundle suggestions into a periodic email, and endorsements let you attach a written note to a recommendation instead of a bare listing. A separate Substack Boost product exists on top of these.

This is the growth loop that distinguishes Substack from a standalone ESP, and the reason is structural rather than clever: every publication sits inside one network, so a recommendation can place your subscribe prompt inside somebody else’s signup flow. No platform where each list lives on its own domain can do that. It is also, unavoidably, a channel Substack controls.

Substack video

Video is native, not embedded. You upload into the post, Substack hosts and plays it, and the guidance is to stay at 1080p or 1440p with an H.264 codec, AAC audio, a bitrate at or below 8 Mbps, and a file no larger than about 20 GB. No maximum duration is published.

Three things come attached. Transcripts generate automatically, the audio track can be pushed straight into your podcast RSS feed so one recording serves both formats, and the flexible paywall applies, letting you release a slice of a paid video to everyone.

Live video runs alongside it, from the mobile app, from a computer, or through an RTMP encoder for anyone using proper streaming software. The audience selector offers three settings: everyone on Substack, all of your free and paid subscribers, or paid subscribers only. That last option is what turns live video into a retention feature rather than a reach feature, and it is the only part of the video stack that needs Stripe.

Substack analytics

The stats you get are total views across web, email and app, an open rate, link clicks as both a percentage of openers and a raw count, subscriber growth split between free and paid, and traffic sources broken out by channel. Retention has its own tab covering paid net growth, paid cohort analysis and paid churn, which is more than most newsletter tools expose without an upgrade.

What is absent is the granular layer: no click map or heatmap, no A/B test reporting beyond the title test, and no revenue reporting below the gross annualised figure. If you need to know which of four links in a post carried the conversion, you are counting by hand.

One caveat on the numbers themselves. Substack changed how app reads are counted, noting that subscribers who view posts in the app were not previously reflected fully in delivery and open metrics. Open rates from before and after that change are not the same measurement, which matters if you are looking at a long trend line.

Continue reading

What it costs once you monetise is on the Substack pricing page. Our full assessment, including deliverability and support, is in the Substack review. If the sending-domain limitation is a dealbreaker, the Substack alternatives page compares platforms that authenticate on your own domain.