🤹🏽How do you decide what is paid and what is free on Substack in 2026?

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Hi Sparklers,

I got a question through on email from a member, friend and client last week.

How do you decide what is paid and what is free on Substack in 2026?

If you run a business, Substack is a great funnel into it. It can also be a healthy income stream on its own but it’s not a long term healthy income stream unless you are famous or can keep building and nurturing your free audience.¹

Yes some people might stay paid year on year but the likelihood is they will move on after 1-2 years. You also have folks who leave and come back. Subscriptions are transient models.

Do you want to paywall ‘your best work?’

A 2025 trend? - I noticed a HUGE swing from annual commitments to monthly subs and a large amount of monthly churn in publications across the board - people are less likely to commit to a year’s subscription for many many reasons. They’ll also jump in monthly because they don’t want to commit or they do but only for a month or two…

It’s all in the conversion rate

Once you know your average % conversion rate from free to paid, you have a number to work with.

You can allow monthly to be part of the picture and get the average.

It’s maths and energetics not a wing and a prayer… my advice is always to try and increase your % conversion if you can… you can do this by paywalling more and building your connection with your audience. It is a balance - free readers need time to convert and some will never pay - that’s the beautiful game. ²

I’ve broken down my advice for those in the first year, second year and third year of their journey on Substack. I’ll go into my fourth year here in April. 💖

So HOW do we balance what is free and what is paid? How much ‘content’ / writing/ of our heart do we put out?

People pay for Substack for four reasons…

1. To feel seen (they recognise something in your work that activates them)

2. To feel educated (they want to learn something)

3. To feel activated (news/ politics/ activism pieces)

4. To feel part of something (communities - not lip service communities - actual communities that break the fourth wall) - My personal fave!

There is magic (🪄) inbetween which is why being paid here can feel like winning the lottery - not the same but the element of surprise and glee is probably similar? 💫

Deeper than that, the answers are of course nuanced so I’ve broken it down to help you think about your own work in relation to what we perceive…

YEAR ONE

If you have just arrived or are building here in your first year, your options are…

Option One - Paid Newsletter/ Blog/ Personal Essays Model.

Patron model

• Turn on your paid option right away and run it as a patron model. No paywall - everyone gets the same and the patrons support your writing. This gives you space to write and figure out what you want this space to be. It also sends magical sparkles back to you in the form of paid subscribers and cheerleading from your biggest fans.

• You write, you tune into what your audience resonates most with, you sit with that and understand what you might want to hold a smaller more intimate circle around if you want to pay wall in the future.

Paywalled model

• This is where I see lots of writer’s ‘go wrong’ - you think because you’ve sent a post with a paywall, people will want to pay - you need to better understand their motivations for paying. I also see frustration because you’ve written something you’re proud of but no one reads it.

• There’s a real art to paywalling and more than that, lots of people just click away because they don’t feel invited.

• Always paywall WITH an invite - type is out - why should they pay past that point… talk to them.

• I hardly ever send paywall posts - I send free posts and then I send emails inviting people to pay with a specific breakdown of the value.

• When I get to see other people’s dashboards I see that paywalls do work of course - we know they do - usually because there is a psychological human need triggered like - FOMO or I need to know or I want to know or I’m fascinated to know… or I want more or I want to be part of this or I really LIKE and want to support this writer - you have to take them from scrolling sleepily to payment activated. ³

I feel like a broken record but you need two things to be paid here on Substack - one - free subscribers, two free subscribers who know, like and trust you.

It also helps if your free subscribers understand substack - if not you need to educate them a little.

If you launch paid and people don’t pay, you don’t have enough know, like and trust factor and you don’t know your audience well enough.

Option Two - Paid membership/ community model.

• You want to be running video classes right away - you need to shorten the nurture timeline and have people understand who you are, your authority, the transformation and community your membership offers. The only way to shorten a timeline is through FREE video or audio especially in a trust recession.⁴

• Your free posts should lead people into a want to go deeper with the topic you educate on or help them get to know what you’re about.

• If you’re just getting started, you might consider three months of free content (video included), you might comp in some colleagues or give away gifts to get the momentum going. If the thought of that makes you feel queasy - you need to dig deeper into what you want, what your goals are and what you’re willing to commit to.

You need to understand how much time you are willing to put in v the income earnt. Use my Substack income calculator to help. 💰

If you are in your second year of writing on Substack…

You should better understand how the platform works and what triggers paid subs. If you don’t - go back through your stats and check where the conversions are coming in.

(stats, email, toggle free subs to see leading lead generation and paid to see leading paid conversion posts)

It’s usually a picture of multiples…

So I might get a paid sub if I’m highlighting a class or in my paid newsletter it could be that it’s the start of a new year and I have a discount running. I also mix in free longer trials which work well for me and bring handfuls of people in at a time.

You’ll see writers share that they’ve taken posts out from behind the paywall for 24/48 hours - this gives their free audience chance to see their paid work which can compound trust over time.

You also need to ask yourself; what do I want to hold space for, what do my audience need? Where do my ideas, passions, words meet their world?

To grow you need to interview your audience, surveys are good, zoom coffees are better, in person meet ups are ABSOLUTELY the one.

Introverts - you can also just click around on their profiles and see what they are about - there’s TONNES of info we can glean just by the way someone describes them selves…

If you are in your third year of writing on Substack…

I’m super happy with my membership here at Sparkle on Substack but the paid newsletter model (over at Creatively Conscious by Claire Venus) for me has felt harder to commit to for a fourth year. Yes I was ambitious and felt I had something to prove- now I just want to do the work that lights us both up and run a successful business with Substack as part of it - it’s actually way easier for me this way.

I think it’s because I know how much work I put into it and I’m questioning doing other projects now… I committed to another year but it’s likely I’ll go paywall free in 2027.

🕵️‍♀️ Here are my top tips to the art of being paid on Substack wherever you are on your journey…

• Your archive is valuable - you want to trawl through it like dusty old wise library shelves. Understand how it all fits together and the journey your first subscribers have been on, your new ones won’t know. Understand your data and subscriber numbers in relation to older content and re-position some of it inside of posts. Please feel proud of your older work - there’s a magic that happens with the more freedom we give ourselves to self express that happens in the early days.

• Get to know who is paying and their motivations - You can send a survey (go to stats/ survey) to better understand what your audience want and need from you. Some love to stay on the journey with you; others leave to support other creators or for a break from consuming. Focus on the ones who stay LONG TERM and send blessings to the subscription model that enables the rest.

• It gets to be EASEFUL - You can sit with what you REALLY want to write about - what fascinates you here and now, what you want to take people behind the scenes of…

• Be a human - You are not a performing circus, you are a living, breathing human who needs rest, inspiration and depth of connection. If you want to feel valued, value your archive, your knowledge, your work. Writing from real life can feel easier that other paths. For example what is a creative practise you have in your life, you could take folks deeper with behind the paywall.

• Mind your energy - Look at stripe and work out your salary from the info you have. Connect to the energy, the effort, the enjoyment - do you want to continue to do it for the average across the years?

Paid newsletter income over three years. Average £3925 a year. Do I want to continue to write for that fee - YES! One of the many questions I asked myself before I launched into what my readers could expect in 2026.

⁵

Mistakes to avoid - things that will keep you stangnant and thinking Substack is broken…

• Over promising - I see this more than anything else.

• Adding more posts weekly - you’ll just burn yourself out and once people have been here a while they struggle with subscription overwhelm, you’ll see your open rate go down too.

• Constantly emailing free subs with paywalled work - once a month is enough if you choose that model.

• Adding community elements to your stack - if you’re not driven by community ie if it doesn’t light you up. Stay congruent!!

• Comparing yourself/ your price/ your output to others

• Not letting your audience in - you are not a bar of chocolate for purchase - this is a beautiful energy exchange - they need to know you, to trust you, to love you if it gets that far along…

My 5 ‘easeful’ wins for paid subscriber growth

1. Adding audio - read some of your archive posts aloud to start and practise then try and add audio in if you can. ⁶

2. Social proof - what do others say about your work - add those kind statements in and amongst your posts, on your about page and in your hero post.

3. Asking yourself how many people you’d REALLY love to read a piece - that will give you the answer as to whether to paywall and where to do it… if you’re happy for everyone to see it, it can go to everyone. Posts that go viral are more often than not FREE to all.

4. Knowing your Strategy and giving it time - you can pose questions in your work that are answered behind a paywall. You can share more intimate elements or income snap shots like I do.

5. Community is a beautiful invite - this can be in chat, in the comments of posts or in zoom calls - whatever you are called to do. It doesn’t have to be online at all there are plenty of writers who organise the occasional get-together or competition for their paid subs and don’t do zoom calls or chat.

As always, I’m around to answer questions in the comments and I’ll see you next week for January Joy(ful) Growth Club with Russell and Claire if you want to join us for 5 days of joyful growth tips and activations.

Sparkle Members - do post your thoughts in our community chat and I’ll personally take a look at your balance of free/ paid this month.

I hope that’s been helpful to you all, please share this post or parts of it onto Notes so others can find my work and this GORGEOUS corner of the internet?

Claire

✨

P.S - More reading/ listening on this topic…

REPLAY - The Four Buyer Types on Substack

Or check out my Make Money on Substack section - https://sparkleon.substack.com/s/substack-10k

My video podcast with Jo Hutton over at Yoga For Tired People - Jo holds space for over 1000 paid members. This is a sneak peak on YouTube - podcast will be edited and out in your podcast players in a couple of months.

PLEASE NOTE - You are not permitted to take my work and feed it to your ai chatbots/ custom GPTs and monetise it. Thanks!

1. Audience growth (and depth) is something I’m super passionate amount - I have a couple of classes to support you on that. You can sign up for free here.

2. Average is 3-5% conversion, 1% is also normal and I’ve seen 10%+ too in my community.

3. I don’t know for sure but I’d hazard a guess that those who write more ‘activated’ content have had more folks trip over and want to pay since Substack rolled out the app option because there is no barrier to payment and we’re a hungry bunch.Substack’s article on paying via the app

4. The trust recession is a fancy name for the wave of us NOT trusting everything we see or are sold online because we’ve been burnt - it’s human nature not to trust someone at first but the bros and the boss babes have ruined it. Greed is a dangerous human emotion - so is the fact that we want to believe something to be true; we get to be discerning and build trust over time.

5. Gross: £3,925, Take-home after Substack, Stripe fees, and VAT/ tax: £1,915.56

6. In 2023, Linda from Substack told me Substacks that introduced audio grew 2.5 times faster than written posts alone… you can listen to our pod here.