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The difference is clear if you go to Ghost Pro's pricing page[1], which looks just like SquareSpace's or WordPress'[2]. The product is the software, support, an

The difference is clear if you go to Ghost Pro's pricing page[1], which looks just like SquareSpace's or WordPress'[2]. The product is the software, support, and hosting. Ghost is focused on providing value directly to the writers. Substack doesn't have a pricing page and their incentives are much more murky. They want to attract writers and subscribers to the platform, but they don't really care if it is the best experience for either group. If they think of some feature that writers hate, but it increases the number of subscribers or some other metric, Substack is going to implement it. 1. https://ghost.org/pricing/ https://ghost.org/pricing/ 2. https://wordpress.com/pricing/ https://wordpress.com/pricing/

mtlynch 2y ago
>Substack doesn't have a pricing page and their incentives are much more murky. I agree that Substack doesn't have pricing page per se, but they have this, which seems pretty transparent to me: https://substack.com/going-paid https://substack.com/going-paid >They want to attract writers and subscribers to the platform, but they don't really care if it is the best experience for either group. If they think of some feature that writers hate, but it increases the number of subscribers or some other metric, Substack is going to implement it. Aren't both platforms vulnerable to this? Ghost charges more when publishers have more members (paid or free), so they similarly have an incentive to increase member signups even if it doesn't financially benefit the publisher. To be clear, both Ghost's and Substack's funding models seem fine to me. It's hard to perfectly align the incentives of the platform, the publishers, and the readers, but both Ghost and Substack have what feels to me like sensible enough alignment. The arguments against Substack feel like motivated reasoning for people who disagree with other aspects of Substack (VC funding, positions on free speech).

mtlynch 2y ago

>Substack doesn't have a pricing page and their incentives are much more murky. I agree that Substack doesn't have pricing page per se, but they have this, which seems pretty transparent to me: https://substack.com/going-paid https://substack.com/going-paid >They want to attract writers and subscribers to the platform, but they don't really care if it is the best experience for either group. If they think of some feature that writers hate, but it increases the number of subscribers or some other metric, Substack is going to implement it. Aren't both platforms vulnerable to this? Ghost charges more when publishers have more members (paid or free), so they similarly have an incentive to increase member signups even if it doesn't financially benefit the publisher. To be clear, both Ghost's and Substack's funding models seem fine to me. It's hard to perfectly align the incentives of the platform, the publishers, and the readers, but both Ghost and Substack have what feels to me like sensible enough alignment. The arguments against Substack feel like motivated reasoning for people who disagree with other aspects of Substack (VC funding, positions on free speech).