If I want to fully support myself from my blog, is substack basically the only reasonable game in town? I'd like that to not be the case, but it seems like it might be?
From numbers people have posted, substack has a much higher conversion rate for writing than patreon, GH, etc.
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If your "work product" really is writing, then I think you'll get much better performance using a product designed for that. Patreon's do-it-all product model induces a lot of compromises. The most important thing, though, is to own the billing tokens:
I've had success with Patreon, and I'm grateful to them—particularly as trailblazers in this space—but I really can't recommend them to anyone starting out now. I've been disappointed in their product execution; I suspect their billing lock-in creates less pressure to improve.
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Because Substack doesn't (yet) add any meaningful platform-level distribution, I don't think there's a strong argument to use it instead of Ghost, which is OSS and doesn't take a cut.
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