Thank you to Theo Pavlich for running the numbers and doing this analysis for me. I am terrible at math, so this breakdown wouldn’t exist without their help. If you’d like to continue supporting my work, or you appreciate this transparency, I’d love if you’d consider upgrading to a paid subscription tier.
With your money, I’m able to hire an editor for my lengthier pieces, report from games in-person, and dedicate time to hosting events like our monthly book club and moderating our thriving Discord community. You can upgrade here:
Seven months ago, I finally bit the bullet and migrated Out of Your League from the Substack platform to Beehiiv. I was terrified to do this, for a variety of reasons. First of all, as a full-time freelancer in a media industry that has rapidly collapsed, this newsletter accounts for nearly two-thirds of my income (yes, you’re all about to see how little money I make lol). I was worried about the viability of being on a platform without the kind of discoverability features that the Substack network promotes—the kind of features that make those of us who publish(ed) there feel beholden to the platform.
There was also the issue of the up-front cost to move to a new platform, requiring me to front hundreds of dollars to purchase a newsletter tier from Beehiiv that would accommodate the size of my audience. It feels overwhelming to leave the security blanket of the Substack network, and over time they have made it increasingly hard to do it. In theory, you own your mailing list, but in practice, it’s much harder to access and move your subscribers.
But I’m someone whose journalism is guided by my moral and ethical principles. I try to live my values through my work, and I could no longer justify staying on a platform that promoted hate speech, platformed Nazis, and put trans people in danger. Since leaving, Substack has made even more problematic decisions. There’s the Polymarket partnership. The promotion of avowed rapist and alleged human trafficker Andrew Tate as their number one bestseller, and the booking of incel “looksmaxxer” Clavicular at one of their parties. You can see a great summary of all the reasons to leave Substack here.
And sure, most newsletter platforms—including Beehiiv, Patreon, and Ghost—are owned by problematic people or host problematic newsletters, but that is the nature of late-stage capitalism. The difference is that Substack actively recruits and pays right-wing influencers to be on their site, and makes a huge profit from Nazi and Nazi-adjacent content. I may have left for ethical reasons, but I have to say that if your concern is purely financial (which was the issue that kept me on Substack way longer than I would have liked to be), you may be surprised by what follows because leaving the Nazi platform has been incredibly financially beneficial. Which I did not necessarily expect!
If you are considering leaving Substack and are worried about doing so, I thought I would share a breakdown of my first seven months on Beehiiv. I am including all my numbers because I believe transparency is important, and is one of the best tools we have for supporting other people in our field(s). If you decide you’d like to migrate to Beehiiv after reading this, I’ll have a referral link at the end of this newsletter.
seven months on beehiiv, by the numbers
To do this analysis, and avoid it getting overcomplicated, I did it as a comparison of “snapshots” which is to say, what OOYL’s substack looked like at the time I started the transition (9/19/25) and what OOYL’s Beehiiv looks like today (4/19/26). It’s not perfect, but it’s close.
Last Day of Substack
On OOYL’s last full day of Substack, there were 3,664 subscribers. 3,309 were free subscribers, and 355 were paid.
The annual gross of that snapshot moment was $13,272 with an annual net of $11,944.80. This might not be exact, because I believe some of the founding subscriptions were one-time-only payments, but that only represents 4 subscribers and $675.
Today on Beehiiv
Today, OOYL has 3,744 subscribers. Interestingly, there are ALSO 3,309 free subscribers at this time! Which means the net difference is ALL PAID!
Currently, there are 435 paid subscribers representing an annual gross of this snapshot of $21,998. Because of the flat fee, the annual net is $21,325.94. This represents a 78.54% increase in net income.
It also means the cut that’s being taken by the platform ($1,327.20 vs $672.06) is a 49.36% decrease. One caveat is that my annual fee will be higher next year ($940), as I took advantage of a sale offering a discounted rate for making an annual payment.
Interim Analysis
In the intervening time, OOYL lost 426 Substack subscribers. 420 (nice) were free, and 6 were paid. I analyzed when they unsubscribed, but there wasn’t really a clear “everyone left at once” number.
Meanwhile, OOYL has gained 523 net new subscribers, 35 of whom have since unsubscribed. 465 of those are free subscribers, and 58 are paid.
For context, a 10% free-to-paid conversion rate is considered “good.” On Substack, I had just under that, with 9.7% of my subscribers being paid. On Beehiiv, 11.6% of my subscribers are paid.
now, some more notes on leaving
Migrating to Beehiiv was not seamless. I was lucky enough to have the help of Beehiiv’s support team, who worked with me personally to move my newsletter over. My friend Theo also helped with a lot of the backend logistics free of charge, because they felt so strongly about helping me get off Substack.
There was a definite adjustment period, and a lot of kinks to work out on the back end. In theory, my subscribers shouldn’t have noticed much of a difference, especially if they got the newsletter delivered into their inbox rather than via the Substack app. In practice, there have been a lot of individual questions and issues I’ve had to fix manually. Again, the Beehiiv support team has been wonderful about assisting with issues that go beyond my ability to fix on my own.
When I first left, I hemorrhaged subscribers for a bit. A lot of those were free subscriptions that were bot emails, which gave my numbers a boost but weren’t real subscribers. Some paid subscribers felt very beholden to being on Substack and left. Others had subscribed when another writer had recommended supporting the work of a trans journalist and then canceled their subscriptions when they renewed.
In December, I was transparent about my need to add paid subscribers and ran a sale, which helped me bring my numbers back up.
My growth has been much slower on Beehiiv than it was on Substack, especially on the free tier. However, those who do subscribe are more engaged and are more likely to upgrade to a paid subscription.
Beehiiv has given me way more control on the back end of my newsletter. I now have different subscription tiers, and I was able to integrate a Discord membership as an automatic feature of subscribing rather than having to send individual messages to each person.
I’ve also asked Theo to share their notes on the transition, as the person who has done the bulk of the heavy-lifting on the back end of the platform. This is what they said:
Highlights:
Beehiiv support has been SUPER responsive. If we need help, we just email them and they have always been able to fix it.
Discord integration
Subscription tiers, and promos, are easy
You own your data: IP version. When we exported the actual posts from Substack, we lost so much data. Basically all we kept were the words. If you ever decide to leave Beehiiv, or for some other reason want all your posts? Simple export that gives you the FULL markdown, including paywalls, images, and more.
You own your data: stats version. Technically, I could recreate OOYL’s open rates…but here’s how it’s exported: we got a CSV file for each post, in that CSV, is a list of each subscriber, and booleans for whether they opened, clicked, forwarded, etc. If that means nothing to you: basically I would have to manually calculate it for each individual post. Might as well mail me an abacus too.
We haven’t leveraged this, but there are other paths for income, like product listings for merch, ad networks, and more. If money is your motive, there are a lot of easy-to-access paths to boost income.
A lot of Substackers have expressed concern about discoverability. Beehiiv makes recommending and connecting other Beehiiv newsletters very easy. OOYL has led to 133 new subscribers on other pubs, and received 97 new subscribers from other pubs. The more publications that leave Substack and join Beehiiv? The more effective this feature will be.
There are a lot of integrations that we haven’t bothered with, because we don’t need them, but if you have other tools that are a part of your publication’s process, it might be there.
Media Library! All the images we’ve ever used live there.
RSS feed if that’s your jam!
We don’t have comments on posts, but we could if we wanted to, just like Substack.
Complaints
Okay, one big complaint is that, for the first few months, there was an issue with upgrades. If people upgraded from one paid tier to another, it kept charging them for both. Why remains unclear BUT there is now a toggle in the backend to prevent this, and Beehiiv customer support has been super responsive about fixing things.
This analysis should be obvious. The dashboards don’t do a great job of highlighting the net difference, we had to export the data and really look to notice what a huge difference the move has made.
I can’t tell you whether you should choose Beehiiv as the platform for you—that’s a choice you have to make for yourself and there are plenty of other great options to consider. I can, however, tell you that you really should get off of Substack now, before it becomes even more difficult to do.
And if you have been convinced to give Beehiiv a try after reading this, here is a referral link. I earn 50% commission for 12 months (that comes from Beehiiv's cut, not yours). My audience receives a 14-day trial + 20% OFF for 3 months to your newsletter, to hopefully convert subscribers your way!
I appreciate you for being here and for reading all this way. Please consider becoming a paid subscriber to the newsletter, or sharing it. I can’t do this work without all of you showing up and supporting it, so thank you.
