kitvssubstack

what each one actually is

Kit (formerly ConvertKit) is an email marketing platform built specifically for creators — automations built around tags and sequences, native support for selling digital products and courses, and full ownership of your subscriber list and pricing with no revenue cut on sales.

Substack is a newsletter publishing platform with built-in monetization (paid subscriptions) and a discovery network — a dedicated app and recommendation system that can surface your newsletter to new readers without you doing any marketing yourself.

pricing, honestly

kit's free tier covers up to 10,000 subscribers, with paid plans scaling by list size afterward — a flat subscription cost, no cut of what you sell. substack is free to start writing and publishing, but takes a 10% cut of paid subscription revenue (plus stripe's processing fees) — there's no flat fee, but you give up a meaningful percentage of every dollar a paying subscriber sends you.

at scale, the math flips depending on how much you're making: a newsletter earning a lot from paid subscriptions will pay substack more in percentage terms than kit's flat subscription fee would cost.

what it's actually like to use them

substack's writing and publishing experience is clean and purpose-built — write a post, hit publish, decide if it's free or paywalled. the app and discovery feed give your work a chance at organic reach that's genuinely hard to replicate elsewhere.

kit's interface is more "marketing tool" than "publishing tool" — it's built around managing subscriber relationships over time: tags, sequences, automations triggered by purchases or behavior. if your business is more than "write posts, get paid to read them," kit's tooling reflects that complexity better.

who kit is for

• creators selling courses, digital products, or memberships beyond just paywalled posts
• anyone who wants full ownership of pricing and subscriber data with no revenue share
• creators building structured onboarding or sales sequences tied to specific subscriber actions

who substack is for

• writers who want a built-in audience-discovery mechanism and are starting from zero
• newsletters where the business model is straightforwardly "pay to read this"
• writers who value a polished, dedicated reading app experience for subscribers

when to avoid each

don't use substack if your business model involves selling things beyond paywalled posts — courses, cohort programs, physical products — its tooling isn't built for that and the 10% cut applies regardless.

don't use kit if you have zero existing audience and were counting on built-in discovery to find your first readers — kit assumes you're bringing an audience, not building one from nothing via the platform itself.

stuff their landing pages won't tell you

• substack's 10% cut is on gross subscription revenue, not profit — it adds up faster than it sounds once you have meaningful paid subscriber counts
• kit's automation builder has a real learning curve — it's powerful but not as immediately intuitive as substack's "just write and publish" simplicity
• migrating a paid substack to another platform means subscribers must re-enter payment info — expect real subscriber drop-off during any migration
• substack's discovery network works best for writing-first content; it's less effective if your newsletter is mostly links or curation rather than original essays
• kit's free tier branding is minimal but the platform name does appear in default email footers unless customized

the call

kit for a newsletter that's really a business — selling products, running structured automations, and keeping full ownership and pricing control without giving up a revenue percentage.

substack for writers who want to start publishing today and lean on its discovery network to find readers, especially if you're starting with little to no existing audience and a straightforward paid-subscription model.