Time

Time moved its newsletters to beehiiv for more features at about 40% of the cost. Time switched from Substack to beehiiv after watching how Morning Brew scaled its newsletter. It kept everything its old platform did, gained 15 other things, and paid about 40% of the cost.

Newsweek made the same move for the same reasons. The source contrasts this with traditional email service providers, which charge from $100,000 a year for capabilities beehiiv offers at $79 a month.

Subversive▶ 30:00

A free platform's percentage fees push its largest publishers to leave. A percentage take rate looks harmless for a small publisher but becomes meaningful as the audience grows, so the biggest publishers are the ones who leave. Fees of $10,000 to $15,000 a year as publishers grow are the top complaint on X about the leader.

Tyler Denk also describes the two platforms as diverging. Substack is building a social platform, while beehiiv brings enterprise-level software to prosumers.

Subversive▶ 30:00

beehiiv won Time by charging flat fees with a 0% take rate. beehiiv charges flat SaaS fees of $49, $79 or $159 a month depending on size, and takes 0% of subscription revenue. One in seven new beehiiv writers now come from Substack, including Time and Newsweek.

The tactic is to find the leader's most hated pricing and build the counterposition into your own. Denk's reasoning: "I don't think by simply building the infrastructure to pass money through the pipes of Stripe that is the value that we should be extracting at that layer."

Subversive▶ 27:30