No, I'm not claiming they aren't spending money. They clearly are, but it's all going on business development to create growth. Unless they mis-manage things in

No, I'm not claiming they aren't spending money. They clearly are, but it's all going on business development to create growth. Unless they mis-manage things in the typical way and end up with 1000 engineers building their own programming language or something, they can scale back on those deals at any point. In fact they have to. The deals that are winning so well for them can't be repeated because they awaken authors to their true value, so next year they won't re-sign them. Nonetheless, the business calculations for this are presumably quite easy to do, so I doubt they will have difficulty converting those writers to profitable revenue streams even if the profits aren't as high as when Substack is exploiting some kind of apparent informational asymmetry.