This website contains affiliate links. Some products are gifted by the brand. As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases. The content on this website was created with the help of AI.
While I share money-making strategies, nothing is "typical", and outcomes are based on each individual. There are no guarantees.
When I first landed on Substack, the thing that stopped me cold was this: people were paying to read other people’s blog posts.
I could not believe it. I’d been blogging for free since AOL said “you’ve got mail,” and here was a platform where readers willingly pulled out a credit card for the kind of thing I’d been giving away for decades. So the first real question I had to answer was the same one you’re probably sitting with right now.
Do I charge? And if I do, how do I actually set this thing up so it makes sense?
Let me walk you through it, the way I figured it out.
The free-versus-paid decision comes first
Before you touch a single setting, you have to decide what you’re using Substack for. Because there are really three ways to run it, and they’re all valid.
One: keep it completely free, and use it to drive people somewhere else — your courses, your coaching, your books, your services. Some folks never charge a dime for the newsletter itself. The newsletter is the top of the funnel, and the money happens off-platform.
Two: charge for it, and make the subscription itself the product.
Three — and this is what I do — do both at the same time.
I genuinely don’t understand why I’d pick only one. With the both-at-once approach, I’m getting the paid subscriptions and I’m still driving people to my ebooks and my coaching from inside the publication. Why would I leave either one on the table? So that’s my bias, and I’ll tell you it’s working. But it doesn’t mean that’s what you have to do. If your real business is a course and the newsletter exists to feed it, free-only might be exactly right for you.
What free subscribers actually get
Okay, say you’ve decided to charge. Now you have to be clear about what the free people get versus the paid people, because a confused reader doesn’t subscribe.
Here’s how I think about the free tier. Free subscribers should get something real and complete — not scraps. Tell them plainly what they’re getting. You’re going to get a preview of my articles each week. Or: you’re going to get one full free article a week, and the second one is for paid.
The free article isn’t a teaser that leaves them annoyed. It’s a real, satisfying piece that makes them think, if this is what she gives away, what’s behind the paywall must be worth it.
That’s the whole psychology. Free has to be good enough to earn trust, so that paid feels like an obvious next step rather than a gamble.
Where to actually put the paywall
Now the mechanical part, because this is where people get tangled.
Inside an article, you don’t have to choose between all-free and all-locked. You can give a section for free and then drop a paywall partway through. The reader gets the opening — the story, the setup, the hook of the idea — and then right at the point where it gets really good, there’s the paywall. They click to subscribe to read the rest.
So a single article can be free up top and paid below the line. On Substack, when you’re writing, you literally place that paywall break wherever you want it in the piece. Put it after you’ve delivered something genuinely valuable and right before the payoff. That’s the sweet spot. Too early and they bounce because you gave them nothing. Too late and there’s no reason to pay.
My rule of thumb: the free portion should be able to stand on its own as something useful, and the paid portion should be the part they’ll feel they’re missing.
Here’s a concrete example of getting it right. Say you’re writing about how you made your first $1,000 on a platform. Free section: the full story of why you started, what you tried, the stuff that flopped, and the moment something clicked. That’s satisfying on its own — a reader could stop there and feel they got value. Then the paywall. Behind it: the exact steps, the specific numbers, the platform settings, the thing you’d only tell someone who’s invested enough to pay. The free part proves you’re worth reading. The paid part is the recipe. Break it anywhere else and you’ve either given away the recipe or starved them before they trust you.
What belongs behind the paywall
This is the question I get most, and the honest answer surprised even me.
What belongs behind the paywall is the deeper version of you. The full story. The specific numbers. The exact how. The behind-the-scenes of what you’re testing and learning in real time. People aren’t paying for information they could Google. They’re paying for access to your actual experience, told straight.
Now, I also experimented with adding bonuses behind the paywall — and I want to be honest about how that went, because everyone assumes bonuses are the magic. I added free ebooks for paid subscribers. I tried an ebook-of-the-month-club kind of thing. And you know what? It really didn’t move the needle as much as you’d think. People weren’t subscribing for the ebooks. They were subscribing for me, for the writing, for the real-time story.
The bonuses are a nice little extra layer of value, and I’m not telling you to skip them. But don’t fool yourself into thinking the stack of freebies is what closes the sale. You are what closes the sale. The bonuses are the bow, not the gift.
The pricing mechanics, and the annual trick
Let me get into the actual money setup, because the numbers work in a way that confused me at first.
Say you charge $10 a month. Twelve months is $120 a year. But here’s the move: you offer an annual option at a discount — so instead of $120, the year costs $100. A lot of people take that deal. They pay for the whole year up front to save a little.
That matters for two reasons. One, you get the cash up front instead of dribbled out monthly, which is lovely. Two, an annual subscriber is locked in for a year, which smooths out the natural churn you get with monthly.
Now, this is also why your dashboard can confuse you. Substack shows revenue “annualized” — it takes each subscriber’s payment and projects it across a full year. So your dashboard number is going to look bigger than what actually hit your account this month. Don’t let it inflate your head. If you want your real monthly average, take that annualized figure and divide it by twelve. I do that math out loud for myself all the time, because I’d rather know the real number than get excited about a projected one.
A quick word on why this is worth doing
I want to tell you one thing about what this paywall actually made possible for me, because it’s not abstract.
When I went through my divorce, the online income I’d been building quietly is what carried me. My Substack — this exact paywall setup I’m describing — helped pay my attorney fees. That’s not a hype line. That’s just what happened. The thing I almost talked myself out of charging for ended up being a real piece of how I got through one of the hardest stretches of my life.
So when I tell you it’s worth setting the paywall up properly, I’m not speaking in theory. I’m speaking from the other side of needing it to work.
Your setup checklist
Here’s the whole thing, boiled down to what to actually do.
Decide your model: free-only to drive other offers, paid as the product, or both at once. Tell your free subscribers exactly what they get, and make it genuinely good. Inside articles, place the paywall after real value and before the payoff. Put your deeper story, real numbers, and full how-to behind the paywall — that’s what people pay for. Add bonuses if you want, but know they’re the bow, not the gift. Offer an annual discount to get cash up front and lock people in. And always do the real monthly math instead of trusting the annualized number.
Now the honest caveat I always give. There’s no guarantee here. Nobody’s pricing, niche, or results are the same as anybody else’s. I’m showing you how I set mine up and what worked for me, not promising it prints the same for you. Your results depend on your niche, your effort, and a hundred individual factors I can’t see from here.
If you want the full walk-through — every setting, every format, the whole build — I put all of it in my Substack 101 guide. You can grab it here: https://loriballen.com/product/substack-101/
And if you want to see this exact paywall setup in the wild, come read me at The Real Time Creator on Substack. You’ll hit my free articles, you’ll hit the paywall, and you’ll get to feel from the reader’s side exactly how the thing I just described actually lands.
Income disclaimer: I’m sharing my own results, which are not typical and not a guarantee of what you’ll earn. There’s no typical income, no guarantee, and no fast track. Your results depend on your niche, your effort, and a range of individual factors.
