John O'Nolan@JohnONolan
Every time Substack make a move that serves the business, they disingenously play it off as something that's in the best interest of users.
> [Email is getting less reliable, so we had to build an app.]
"I know I've said this a lot, but I cannot emphasize enough that email will continue to become less deterministically reliable as a means for distributing your work; this is a huge part of why we got into the app and feed business!"
Sure. And there's also the economics. One of the largest overheads for any newsletter platform is email delivery — it's expensive, and it scales linearly with subscribers. Delivering the same content by API to an app you own is essentially free, and keeps users inside your ecosystem.
The app isn't some reluctant response to problematic technology, it's just a better business. That would be perfectly fine to say out loud.
Instead it's "email is unreliable, actually" - a pretty stark reversal of how they used to talk about email.
Substack CEO in 2018:
"[Email is] the one channel that you have as an independent writer to reach a reader base that’s not directly mediated by a third party. It doesn’t have a Facebook algorithm deciding what people are going to see."
In 2026: email is bad, and the answer is the Substack app, mediated by the Substack algorithm deciding what people are going to see.
Yes, email is more complicated than it used to be, but there are thousands of newsletter platforms out there, and only one of them is insisting that the only solution to reliable distribution is using their branded app.
> [Nobody feels locked into Substack.]
"I saw several wags speculate that this was because we were trying to achieve 'lock in' at the behest of our investors. Brother, if you've ever heard of someone who feels locked-in to Substack because of their follow graph, please tell me."
The lock-in is not the follow graph. That's a complete strawman.
People feel locked in because mobile paid subscriptions are literally locked in.
Subscriptions started on the web sit in the writer's own Stripe account — portable, owned, migratable. Subscriptions started inside the Substack app are permanently stuck on Substack. Which, ofc, is conveniently "[just how mobile works, Apple make us do it]" - but publishers don't even have an option to disable paid subscriptions through the Substack app, they are forced into using it.
We migrate people off Substack to @Ghost every week. One of the top complaints is "I need to get out before any more of my revenue gets locked into the Substack app."
Substack is a venture-backed platform optimising for retention, unit economics, and platform dependency. That is a perfectly normal thing for a venture-backed platform to do.
Just say what you're actually doing and stop trying to dress it up as something else.
