Substack is a hosted newsletter and paid subscription platform that takes a share of subscription revenue; pages here cover moving to self-hosted Ghost or listmonk.
Comparing Substack with Ghost, self-hosted or on Ghost(Pro), for paid newsletters: revenue share against no transaction fee, your own domain and design, member and Stripe ownership, discovery inside Substack that you give up, and running Ghost yourself.
Moving a publication from Substack to self-hosted Ghost: creating the Substack export, running Ghost's Substack migrator for posts and members, reconnecting the same Stripe account so paid subscribers keep paying, custom domains and redirects.
For organizations that use Substack only to email a list: listmonk's self-hosted lists, segments, templates and analytics with your own SMTP provider, what it lacks against Substack (paid subscriptions, a hosted archive and discovery) and when that does not matter.
Cost of ownership by component: Substack's 10% share of subscription revenue plus card fees, against Ghost hosting, MySQL and email delivery, Stripe fees, migration and maintenance, and the revenue level at which self-hosting pays for itself.
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