How to Migrate Your Newsletter From Substack to Buttondown

Maybe you don't want to give 10% of your revenue to a venture-backed Silicon Valley company. Maybe you don't trust a venture-backed Silicon Valley company to not eventually pivot away from newsletters completely and destroy everything you built. Maybe you don't want your newsletter hosted on a service that pays extremists. There are a lot of reasons you might want to leave Substack.

Some writers are leaving Substack for Ghost. I recommend Buttondown because of that. You can migrate your subscribers and archive from Substack to Buttondown.

Buttondown versus Stubstack.

Buttondown has a comparison with Substack, but a few features stand out to me.

Pricing is the first thing. Buttondown is free for up to 100 subscribers, but it costs $9 a month for up to 1,000, and the price goes up from there. Substack takes a 10 percent cut from all paid subscriptions, which is a big deal if you want to make a living from your newsletter. If you grow a subscriber base that brings in $4,000 a month, you will pay $400 to Substack. The most expensive tiers of Buttondown will cost less than that.

Features are the second thing to think about. Substack doesn't support autosaving, but Buttondown does. Buttondown does not collect user data unless you turn those features on. It is more important that you can write your newsletters in markdown than it is that you have an Zapier integration. I love using markdown. Substack doesn't offer all kinds of nerdy stuff.

Buttondown isn't beholden to any investors. There is a powerful group of people hoping for massive growth because Substack has $82 million of investor money. I admit that I am a veteran of the content mines, but they rarely have the interest of journalists and writers in the long term. Buttondown is run by a single person who responds to emails himself and publicly reports how much money he spends on the service.

Every time someone subscribes, Buttondown sends you a fun Gif. That's the reason to migrate over, so let's talk about how you can do that.

Substack can be used to export your newsletter.

Go to the dashboard and sign up for your newsletter. The top bar has a settings link. The export your data section can be found at the bottom. Click to create a new export.