Platform publishing has quietly become a revenue share. Substack keeps 10% of member revenue, forever (verified, their own going-paid page); Patreon takes 10% from all new creators since August 2025 (verified); Memberful charges $49 per month plus a 4.9% transaction fee (verified); Ghost(Pro) is tiered by member count, from $18-29 per month at 1,000 members to $199 at 10,000 (verified); beehiiv Scale is $43 per month (verified). The tool you publish with grows its cut as your audience grows.
What the 10% cut costs a paid publication
| Member revenue | Substack keeps (10%) | Ghost on Node: £22 flat |
|---|---|---|
| £250/month | £25/month | Break-even, and flat from here |
| £1,000/month | £100/month | Save about £900/year |
| £4,000/month | £400/month | Save about £4,500/year |
| 10,000 free members | Ghost(Pro) at this tier: $199/month (verified) | £22 flat, no member tiers |
| Capability | Platform stack | On Node (flat, hourly billed) |
|---|---|---|
| Newsletter & paid memberships | Substack: 10% of member revenue (verified); Memberful: $49/mo + 4.9% (verified) | Ghost (Small): £22 |
| Magazine site & merch | Separate site-builder and store subscriptions | WordPress + WooCommerce (Medium): £45 |
| Audience analytics | The platform's dashboard, on the platform's servers | Matomo (Small): £22 |
| Reader & member support | Per-agent helpdesk seats (reported) | Chatwoot (Small): £25 |
| Identity, SSO & audit | Spread across the above | Included with your apps: £0 |
| Indicative total | 10% of revenue plus subscriptions, rising with members | £114 flat, 0% of revenue |
The caveat belongs next to the numbers: leaving a platform means leaving its discovery network, and migration is a project we help with, not a button. What you get back is a bill that never scales with your success. Ask us for a like-for-like figure.
What your publication runs on Node
Everything below is managed setup, deployed and connected by our engineers; if you want to try the platform first, Nextcloud, EspoCRM, DocuSeal and n8n deploy self-serve from the signup portal.
Newsletter & memberships: Ghost (Small, £22/month equivalent): 0% of revenue, no member caps, your own Stripe account, your domain, your subscriber list. Ghost's own publishers showcase includes 404 Media, Platformer, The Lever, Tangle and The Browser, whose move off Substack is publicly documented; Buffer's and Kickstarter's blogs run Ghost too.
Magazine site & merch: WordPress + WooCommerce (Medium, £45): the full magazine site, sponsor pages and merch store that a newsletter platform will not give you.
Audience analytics: Matomo or Umami (Small, £22 or £21): privacy-respecting analytics on your own infrastructure, configurable cookieless; see the PECR answer in the FAQs before assuming banner-free.
Reader support & publication email: Chatwoot + Mailcow (Chatwoot Small, £25; Mailcow managed setup): member queries, comp requests and billing questions in one shared inbox, with editorial email on your own domain rather than a founder's Gmail.
Editorial database: Directus or NocoDB (Small, £22): structured commissioning trackers, source lists and rights logs your spreadsheets are impersonating today.
Editorial independence you can point at
A publication's subscriber list and reading data are its business, and for some titles its sources' safety. On Node they sit on hardware we own in UK data centres, under UK jurisdiction, in a network-isolated tenant behind your own single sign-on, with sign-ins and admin actions audited, and a UK GDPR Article 28 DPA as standard. No US platform can change its fees or moderation posture under you: Patreon's August 2025 pricing change and The Browser's Substack exit are the receipts for why that clause matters. No product makes you compliant, and we will not claim otherwise; this is infrastructure for duties that remain yours.
AI for the desk, without leaking the story
Transcribing interviews, drafting standfirsts, summarising documents: the AI gateway labels every model UK-hosted or partner-routed; UK-hosted models run on GPUs we own, so unpublished copy and source material never leave our infrastructure. Metered per token in GBP on the same hourly invoice.
Run Ghost alongside Substack first
Try the platform self-serve in minutes with £25 of free credit, or tell an engineer your member count and revenue for a like-for-like figure and a migration plan.
Frequently asked questions
How does the billing work compared with a revenue share?
Everything is billed hourly against a published rate card, with no minimum term and no contract; the monthly figures on this page are equivalents for an app left running all month. Stop an app and the meter stops. Nothing takes a percentage of your member revenue and nothing tiers by subscriber count, so a growth month changes your income, not your software bill.
Do we lose Substack's recommendations network if we leave?
Yes, and we will say so plainly: Substack's discovery and recommendations network stays behind when you go, and Patreon's browse pages do too. Self-hosting suits publications that bring their own audience through their list, SEO and social reach. If platform discovery is still where most of your growth comes from, the 10% may be worth paying a while longer.
How hard is the migration from Substack or Patreon?
It is a real project, not a button, and we help with it. Subscribers export cleanly from Substack, paid members transfer by reconnecting the same Stripe account so cards do not need re-entering, and redirects preserve your archive's search standing. Plan a quiet week for it. The Browser's move from Substack to Ghost is publicly documented and is the shape of the exercise.
What does a paid newsletter actually cost to run here?
From the published rate card, with no platform fee: Ghost is £22 per month equivalent and Matomo £22, so a publication with its own analytics is £44 per month equivalent plus VAT, billed hourly. The full stack on this page, with a WooCommerce site and reader support, is £114. The figure is the same at 500 members or 50,000, because nothing counts members.
Can we run analytics without a cookie banner?
Matomo and Umami can both run cookieless, which is the honest route to banner-free analytics. But be careful with the folk wisdom: the famous consent exemption for Matomo is a French CNIL ruling, not UK law. UK PECR and ICO cookie guidance still apply unless the deployment is actually configured cookieless, which is how we set it up by default.
Who owns the subscriber list and the payment relationship?
You do, in the plainest sense: Ghost runs against your own Stripe account under your own domain, the member table sits in your own tenant on hardware Node owns in UK data centres, and you can export it any time. A UK GDPR Article 28 data processing agreement is standard, and no platform sits between you and your readers to change fees or moderation policy under you.