Substack Revenue Calculator
Calculate exact Substack and Stripe fees to find your true net subscription revenue.
Your Substack Audience
Substack requires a minimum of $5/month.
Fee Breakdown
Why are Stripe fees so high? The flat $0.30 fee per transaction takes a massive bite out of lower-priced subscriptions. For a $5/month sub, Stripe takes almost 9% of your revenue. Encourage users to buy annual subscriptions to minimize this flat fee.
Net Monthly Revenue
Take-home pay per month
The Ultimate Substack Revenue Calculator
If you are planning to monetize your newsletter, understanding the true cost of platform fees is critical. Substack advertises a straightforward business model: it is free to publish, and they only take a 10% cut when you start charging for subscriptions. However, many new writers forget to account for the hidden cost of credit card processing.
FluxToolkit's Substack Revenue Calculator provides complete financial transparency. We calculate both the flat Substack platform fee and the variable Stripe processing fees to show you exactly what your "take-home" pay will be at the end of the month.
How Much Does Substack Really Take?
To calculate your true net income on Substack, you must account for two distinct fees taken out of every transaction:
1. The Substack Platform Fee (10%)
Substack takes a flat 10% cut of your gross subscription revenue. This fee pays for the platform's infrastructure, email delivery, hosting, and customer support. If a reader pays $5.00 for a monthly subscription, Substack takes $0.50.
2. The Stripe Processing Fee (2.9% + $0.30)
Substack uses Stripe as its exclusive payment processor. Every time a reader's credit card is charged, Stripe takes 2.9% of the transaction total, plus a flat fee of $0.30 USD. This flat fee is the hidden killer for low-priced subscriptions.
How Stripe Fees Secretly Eat Your Revenue
The math behind Stripe's flat $0.30 fee disproportionately affects writers who charge the minimum $5.00/month subscription price. Let's break down the math on a $5.00 transaction:
- Gross Revenue: $5.00
- Substack Fee (10%): -$0.50
- Stripe Fee (2.9% + $0.30): -$0.45
- Total Fees: $0.95 (19% of your total revenue!)
- Your Net Payout: $4.05
As you can see, on a $5.00/month subscription, your effective fee rate isn't 10%—it's nearly 19%. This is why many successful Substack writers heavily incentivize annual subscriptions. If a user pays $50 upfront for a yearly subscription, the $0.30 flat fee is only applied once, dramatically lowering your effective fee rate.
100% Client-Side Privacy
Your subscriber counts and pricing strategies are your business. When you use the FluxToolkit Substack Revenue Calculator, your inputted data is never transmitted to our servers. All financial calculations are performed locally in your browser, ensuring your business metrics remain completely private and secure.