Substack isn't a CRUD app with a few features, it is man-years of work on the technical side. More importantly, they've had amazing execution on the business and product side.

I have a free newsletter about product management and willingly paid the $50. $50 seems like a better deal to me.

Substack has a different financial incentive structure that attracts writers away from alternatives such as Medium.com or hosted WordPress: monetization is easy to go from free to paid newsletters.

Substack _is_ good for casual use, but I have various beefs with them, the main one being that they re trying to build yet another platform instead of being part of an ecosystem.

But if it's your primary source of income, it's bad business to be subject to the whims of a platform you have no control over.

It fits a niche: someone who wants their content online without coding with no hosting cost and doesn’t want to rely on third party platforms like Substack.

The only way of monetizing your writing is to use Substack or Medium, or whatever.