Are you sending a newsletter or selling one?
This decides everything else, and the two products look similar until money is involved. Sending means composing, list management, segmentation and deliverability — MailerLite, Brevo, GetResponse, CleverReach and Moosend all do this well.
Selling means memberships, tiers, a paywall deciding which subscriber sees which article, payment processing, failed-payment recovery and churn management. Ghost and Steady do this; the email platforms do not, and bolting a payment link onto a newsletter tool leaves you reconciling two systems by hand every month.
Ghost includes memberships, paid tiers, newsletters and Stripe integration in the core product and is a full CMS, so the newsletter has a website around it with themes and a content API. Steady approaches from the other side: it handles the membership and payment layer and works with whatever website you already have.
The practical rule: if the newsletter is marketing for something else you sell, buy an email platform. If the newsletter is the product, buy Ghost or Steady, because the payment and access machinery is the part you cannot improvise.
What does a revenue share actually cost you?
It scales with your success, which is exactly when you notice it. Substack takes a percentage of subscription income permanently, and the arithmetic is unforgiving: at €100,000 a year that is thousands of euros annually for software that costs the same to run whether you earn €10,000 or €1,000,000.
Ghost takes nothing. Ghost(Pro) is about $9 a month regardless of what you earn, or free if you self-host under the MIT licence, and a publisher keeps their subscription revenue minus payment processing. For a growing publication that difference compounds every year.
Steady sits deliberately in between with no monthly fee and a revenue share instead, which inverts the risk: it costs nothing while you are building an audience and more once the income is real. For an independent journalist starting out with no budget, that is the right shape; past a certain revenue it stops being.
The calculation worth doing is not which is cheaper today but where the crossover sits at your realistic twelve-month income, because switching a paid membership base between platforms is genuinely painful.
Why does the payment method decide the conversion rate?
Because a checkout that does not offer how someone pays is a checkout they abandon, and in Europe the default is not a card.
Steady is built around this specifically: SEPA direct debit plus the local payment methods German-speaking audiences actually use. In Germany, where card penetration for recurring consumer payments is far lower than in the US or UK, offering only a card is a substantial and largely invisible loss — the reader wanted to subscribe and simply did not finish.
It matters more for memberships than for one-off purchases. A recurring subscription paid by SEPA direct debit also fails less often than one on a card, because a mandate does not expire while a card does, and expired-card churn is the largest silent revenue loss in subscription publishing.
Ghost uses Stripe, which covers SEPA and European methods but requires configuration and a Stripe account of your own. That is more work and more control.
Who owns the audience, and can you take it with you?
This is the question a publisher should ask before the feature list, because a subscriber list is the entire asset.
Ghost is unambiguous: self-host it and the database is yours, or use Ghost(Pro) and export at any time, with the whole thing MIT-licensed and governed by a non-profit foundation. There is no owner who can accept an acquisition and change the terms afterwards, which for a business whose income runs through the platform is a structural guarantee rather than a promise.
Steady works with your existing website rather than replacing it, so the publishing side stays yours by construction — though the membership and payment relationship lives with Steady.
The email platforms all support list export, which covers the addresses but not the paid relationship: moving a list is straightforward, moving active subscriptions with their payment mandates is not. That asymmetry is why the platform choice matters more once money is involved.
What actually determines whether the email arrives?
List hygiene, more than any platform feature. Sending to addresses that never opted in, or continuing to mail people who have not opened anything in two years, damages sender reputation faster than any configuration can repair.
Double opt-in is the single most effective practice and is standard rather than optional in German-speaking markets, which is why CleverReach builds its consent handling around it and why German deliverability expectations are stricter than the European baseline.
The platform contributes sending infrastructure, authentication setup and the tooling to notice problems early. MailerLite, GetResponse and Moosend all publish deliverability as a focus; CleverReach's reputation management is built around German sending infrastructure specifically.
The measurable check before committing is unglamorous and reliable: during the trial, send a real campaign to a real segment and look at where it landed, rather than at the platform's own deliverability claim.
