# Looking for a Substack alternative?

> Substack takes 10% of paid-subscription revenue and sends through Mailgun. Email Fast prices sending volume, runs its own pipes, and includes archive and RSS.

Canonical: https://emailfast.dev/compare/substack-alternative

Substack's discovery network drives real subscriber growth — that's their headline
claim, and the honest reason to be there. The price: 10% of your paid-subscription
revenue, plus payment processing, on delivery Substack itself runs through a third
party (Mailgun). Email Fast makes the opposite bets — you keep your revenue and we
run our own pipes — and we have no discovery network to offer you.

## The comparison

| | Substack | Email Fast |
|---|---|---|
| Cost to publish | Free; 10% of paid-subscription revenue plus payment processing | Priced by sending volume ([pricing](/pricing)); no revenue share |
| Growth | A discovery network that drives real subscriber growth | None — growth is yours to earn |
| Delivery | Runs on a third-party provider (Mailgun) | Email Fast runs its own mail transfer agent, warmup engine, reputation breaker, and per-tenant fair queue — the pipes are ours, not resold |
| Developer surface | No developer API surface | SDKs for the browser (EmailJS-compatible), Node.js, Python, PHP, Go, and Ruby, plus a zero-dependency CLI and a published OpenAPI specification |
| Security page | None found at verification | Open [security page](/security) |

## The 10%, in numbers

At $50,000 a year in paid subscriptions, 10% is $5,000 a year, every year, before
payment processing. Here, reader billing runs through Stripe and we charge for
sending volume — your cost scales with how much you send, not how well you monetize.
Newsletters with a public archive and RSS feeds are on every plan. Honesty requires
the other side stated plainly: reader billing opens with general availability, and
the discovery network you'd be leaving is real.

## Where Substack is the right choice

- **The network is the product.** Discovery drives real growth, and no infrastructure feature substitutes for readers finding you.
- **Zero upfront cost, zero operations.** Free to publish, nothing to configure, nothing to maintain.
- **Writing is your whole job** and you want to keep it that way.

## Switching

Export your subscriber list and bring it over — contacts and subscribers are never billed — we price sending, not the size of your audience. Archive
and RSS are built in, and consent-first growth comes with it: hosted signup forms with double opt-in through our own delivery path, so every subscriber carries verifiable proof of consent.
Start with a [sandbox key](/get-started): sandbox keys (ef_sandbox_…) that run the real pipeline dry: real validation, real rendering, real events, a hosted capture inbox — and no email leaves. Live delivery opens at
launch; reader billing opens with general availability.

*Substack is a trademark of its owner; Email Fast is not affiliated with or endorsed by them. Facts about Substack were verified on their public pages on the date above — corrections: [hello@emailfast.dev](/contact).*

## Does Email Fast have anything like Substack's discovery network?

No, and we won't pretend a feature list substitutes for one. Discovery drives real subscriber growth — it's Substack's headline claim and the best reason to choose them. If you leave, you take over growth yourself; what we provide toward it is hosted signup forms with double opt-in through our own delivery path, so every subscriber carries verifiable proof of consent.

## Who actually delivers Substack's email?

A third-party provider — Mailgun. It's a pattern in this genre: every newsletter platform we surveyed rents its delivery: beehiiv's status page lists SendGrid components; Buttondown's subprocessor list names Mailgun and Postmark; Substack sends through Mailgun (verified on their own public pages, July 2026).

## Can I run a paid newsletter on Email Fast today?

The platform is built for it — public archive, RSS, and paid subscriptions with reader billing through Stripe — but reader billing opens with general availability, and live delivery opens at launch. Today you can build and test everything against a sandbox key .

## What does the 10% add up to?

Plain arithmetic: $50,000 a year in paid subscriptions pays Substack $5,000 that year, before payment processing. Our pricing is volume-based and published: pricing .