Custom domains now available on Substack
blog.substack.com> To use custom domains, you’ll be charged a one-time $50 fee per publication.
I wonder why they're doing this. Substack is already taking 10% of revenue which is huge.
I think a better model would have been to offer it for free to paid newsletters so it's considered a premium feature and it can't be abused by their users not generating any revenue.
But then it's not available on free newsletters, even if the author would prefer to pay for it. Not sure what the problem is with this model. $50 isn't really meaningful hit -- it's not a recurring cost or anything.
I also disagree that 10% of revenue is a "huge" chunk. Running your own mail list and custom domain isn't trivial (not to mention acquiring readers in the first place).
$50 is a lot for a feature that most SaaS are offering for free.
> Running your own mail list and custom domain isn't trivial
Regardless of whether this is trivial or not, Substack is a service, not a partner.
If one day you decide to increase your prices and work your ass off to produce more valuable content to your readers, why should Substack get more money?
If instead of sending newsletters we were talking about ecommerce (which is way less trivial) would you be ok with Shopify charging 10% of revenue?
What about AWS charging you 10% of your revenue?
What?? Most SaaS are absolutely not offering custom domains for free. What services are you looking at?
From the top of my mind here are some SaaS that don't charge you extra for a custom domain or even give it for free in their free tier:
- Shopify
- Sendgrid
- Mailchimp
- Wordpress.com
- Firebase
- Vercel
- Netlify
- Surge
Even free blog platforms give you customs domains with HTTPS for free: https://hashnode.com/
My guess is that they have a manual pipeline where it requires some effort from a physical person to setup SSL. This $50 is to offset their cost of setup.
It takes a programmer like half a day to automate a let's encrypt process, maybe a couple if you want to make it really robust.
For example, these days most wordpress hosts do this for you for free.
Not that I think it's unreasonable to charge for this, just saying it's probably not the reason.
I think it is probably just another revenue grab. Most people who care enough are willing to pay $50 (I have a free newsletter about product management and willingly paid the $50).
The alternative is a self-hosted or SaaS subscription to something like Ghost or Mailchimp. $50 seems like a better deal to me.
I suspect they are gauging general interest on whether people are willing to pay for custom domain or if they could pivot to a SaaS enterprise model on the side.
This is great news since it decreases the lockin / leverage that Substack has over individual writers on the platform. It's a creator-friendly choice and I respect that Substack is putting their money where their mouth is in that respect!
+1. Custom domains are (less than) table stakes in my book.
I took this approach in the e-commerce space a decade ago, and assumed that no serious merchant would ever dream of paying for an e-commerce solution that required them to link to a subdomain on another company's domain to take orders.
I was wrong. In fact, a lot of merchants saw the third-party domain as a status thing. There were thousands of merchants in one tribe and thousands in another. They are still doing it today, including at levels of commerce that prove that I was not just off, but that I totally misread the market.
> I was wrong. In fact, a lot of merchants saw the third-party domain as a status thing.
An argument against custom domains being a "premium" feature, then? If you don't have a paid plan, then you have to bring your own domain. Paying gets you the *.example.com status symbol. Makes sense — a custom domain usually requires technical expertise and some amount of inconvenience for users (not unlike a services company that publishes their source code to GitHub, which you can always set up and maintain for yourself, but if you want to use the company's hosted services, then you have to pay). Another part of the value proposition would be, "You're gonna have to spend money one way or another — either to a registrar or to us — so why not let it be us?"
Not just a status symbol. Small merchants know that customers need to trust who they are paying. When customers see *.commercebrand.com they feel way better than when they are asked to enter their credit card on, say, a sushi restaurant's domain. Hell, so do I.
It depends on how much trust they put behind the domain name and operating company. People trust amazon which trickles down to sellers on it.
People trust few domain extensions more than others even though many of them are similarly priced and available. It's all about who else is using the same extension. .com? Used by most companies. .news ? no one? not trust worthy then.
It's somewhat fascinating to me that the bigger the company, the more trust people put in their verification of actors employed on the platform. Intuitively, I would think the more actors in a company - the less trustworthy or verified the actors would be.
Yes, it is refreshingly open compared to the walled gardens it seems like everyone else is trying to make.
I say, give it a few years :)
If they take away the custom domain option, that's quite a canary. So useful in either case.
Medium did it and it wasn't received well. I hope Substack learns from their Mistake.
They already did. This is the return of an existing feature.
Agree. $50 is totally reasonable for a custom domain and free email sending. You'd pay that in 2-3 months using hosted Ghost, Mailchimp, ConvertKit, Wordpress, etc.
Does substack allow (paid) anonymous writing? I could not immediately find how this works from the faq. Will they protect their writers?
You can be pseudonymous but I'm sure they have KYC requirements of some kind.
How would you collect payment? Monero or some similar crypto currency?
Honest question: Is it actually hard to implement (securely) custom domains? In the long term I want to offer custom domains for my product (which does not exist yet).
No. Caddy does this: https://laravel-news.com/unlimited-custom-domains-vapor
Keyword you want is "on-demand TLS"
+100 for Caddy as your web server or a reverse proxy in front of your stack. It’s incredible.
It is with SSL and a CDN. Many pipelines aren't setup well for the new world of SSL everything.