How to migrate from Substack, in one line: get the math right, then move the list, then handle Stripe last. Most guides hand you the checklist first and skip the math, which is the part that decides whether the move is worth doing at all.
This is the order to do it in, with the specific trap at each step.
Make the decision a math problem first
Substack takes 10% of every paid subscription, every month, for as long as the reader stays subscribed. Substack's own pricing page spells it out. That fee is what you are deciding to keep paying or stop paying. Everything else in a migration is plumbing.
A short worked example. A publication with 1,000 paid subscribers at $7/month grosses $7,000/month, of which Substack keeps $700/month, or $8,400/year. A flat-rate publishing OS typically charges $30 to $50/month at that list size. The crossover sits somewhere around your first paid subscriber; by 100 paid subscribers, flat rate is already cheaper, and the gap widens every month after.
The full table at 1k, 5k, and 25k paid subscribers, plus the Stripe surcharge stack, is in our piece on the Substack tax. Run that math first. If the percentage is still a rounding error against the value of Substack's discovery surface, do not migrate yet. If the percentage is buying a senior engineer's salary every year, keep reading.
What you give up when you leave
The strongest case for staying on Substack is the network. Recommendations from other publications, the Notes feed, the native reader app, and the substack.com discovery surface all bring new subscribers that would not have found you on your own. By the platform's own framing, that network is responsible for a meaningful share of free signups across the platform, and a smaller share of paid signups.
When you leave, you keep the readers who already subscribed. You lose the inbound. New growth has to come from your own social, your own SEO, and the kind of community word-of-mouth that compounds slowly.
Most publications past a few thousand paid subscribers find that the share of new paid growth coming from inside Substack has already plateaued. At that point the network is no longer earning the 10%. The check is: in the last 90 days, what share of new paid subscribers came from Substack-internal sources versus your own newsletter, social, and referrals? If internal sources are under roughly 30%, the network is not paying for itself anymore.
What it usually costs in subscribers
Plan for losing 10% to 30% of your paid subscribers during the move, per the patterns documented in independent migration write-ups. The loss is not because the new platform is worse. It is because the migration introduces failure points the original send did not have: emails that bounce on the first send from a new sending domain, billing handoffs that miscount lapsed cards, list hygiene that drops dormant emails the platform was quietly carrying, and a small group of paid subscribers who use the moment to cancel a subscription they had forgotten about.
The free list usually loses less, often 5% to 15%, mostly because the first send from the new sender reputation lands in spam for a slice of inboxes. The list is the asset, so this is the number to watch.
Export the list and the posts
From the Substack dashboard, go to Settings, then Exports. Download the subscriber list (a CSV with email, name, subscription status, and paid status) and the posts archive (a separate download with each post as HTML or markdown). Keep both files in two places. The list is the thing you carry between platforms forever; the posts are the archive you reupload once.
Open the CSV in a spreadsheet and skim it. Most migrations turn up a handful of malformed rows: comma-in-name bugs, empty email fields, duplicates from people who resubscribed with a typo. Clean those before you import. The next platform will not do it for you.
For the posts, almost every major publishing tool offers a direct Substack importer. Buttondown documents the shape of what to expect: you paste your Substack publication URL, the importer pulls posts and images, and you spot-check a handful of the oldest and newest posts to confirm formatting carried over. Other tools follow the same pattern. The work that is not automatable is the spot-check.
The Stripe handoff is where money breaks
This is the step the platform-mechanics guides skip and the step that loses paid subscribers if you get it wrong.
Do not click "Disconnect Stripe" in your Substack dashboard. That action cancels every active paid subscription and refunds the most recent charge. People who were happily paying you yesterday are suddenly not. Stripe Connect, the integration Substack uses, treats a self-service disconnect as a teardown.
Instead, email Substack support with a single, specific request: disconnect Stripe from your publication and remove the 10% application fee, without cancelling or refunding any existing subscriptions. That exact language matters. It tells support to revoke the OAuth connection and remove the platform fee on the underlying subscriptions, which keeps the Stripe subscriptions alive and the customers' billing intact.
Once that is done, your new platform connects to the same Stripe account and continues billing the subscriptions that already exist. Subscribers do not re-enter card details. The next renewal happens on the same day, at the same price, with no 10% application fee on top.
A small caveat: paid subscriptions Substack added through its iOS app cannot follow you cleanly. Those have to be re-subscribed through the new platform if they convert at all. The number is usually tiny; bake it into the expected loss.
The first 30 days on the new platform
Announce four to six weeks before the cutover. Tell subscribers what is moving, when, and why. The single biggest migration mistake is silence: readers who get an email from an unfamiliar sender after a quiet Substack feed will mark it as spam.
On the cutover day, leave a goodbye post live on Substack pointing at the new URL. Update the subscribe and about pages on Substack to do the same. If you have a custom domain pointed at Substack, repoint it to the new platform on day one. The link equity that lives on your URL is the one piece of SEO that follows you cleanly.
Send the first edition from the new platform within seven days. Long gaps after a sender change train inboxes to forget you, and the new sender reputation needs a few sends to warm. Start with a short, high-engagement edition; deep dives can come once deliverability is steady.
The point of the move
A subscriber converts roughly 10× better than a follower. That number is the point of running a list at all, and it is also the point of leaving a platform that takes a cut of the conversion. The full math is in our piece on subscribers versus followers.
Nashra is the publishing OS underneath the writing: one editor, one subscriber list as the spine, the same draft becoming an inbox send and a blog post in one motion, a flat monthly fee that does not scale with the revenue you brought in. The head-to-head with Substack is at our Substack comparison; the migration tools do not lock you in either way.
