Constants vs Substack: The Same 10 Percent Fee, Two Different Kinds of Page

Substack and Constants both charge creators a flat 10 percent cut on paid subscriptions, but that is close to where the similarity ends.

What Substack Actually Costs

Substack is free to publish on no matter how many free subscribers a writer has. The moment paid subscriptions are turned on, Substack takes 10 percent of that revenue off the top, with no cap and no lower tier that kicks in as volume grows. Standard card processing applies on top of that cut, 2.9 percent plus 30 cents per transaction, and Substack layers on an additional 0.7 percent recurring-billing fee that most fee breakdowns skip past. Add it up and the true take lands closer to 13 to 16 percent of gross once processing is counted, and the lowest price a creator can set for a paid subscriber is 5 dollars a month.

What Constants Actually Costs

Constants lands on the same headline number, a flat 10 percent subscription fee on memberships, with the same kind of standard card processing every platform passes through. There is no separate recurring-billing surcharge stacked on top of the platform cut the way Substack adds one. The free Starter plan covers selling memberships from day one; Premium at 29.99 dollars a month is an optional upgrade for creator tools, not a requirement to unlock a lower fee.

For a concrete example: a creator with 100 members paying 10 dollars a month grosses 1,000 dollars. On Substack, roughly 130 to 160 dollars of that goes to fees once the platform cut, card processing, and the recurring-billing fee are all counted. On Constants, the flat 10 percent subscription fee works out to 100 dollars, plus the same standard processing every payment processor charges, with no extra recurring-billing line item stacked underneath it.

What You Are Actually Selling

Landing on the same 10 percent headline number makes the fee comparison close to a wash, which means the real decision comes down to the shape of the product a subscriber is paying for. Substack is built around one thing: a newsletter delivered by email, with the option to paywall specific posts or an entire archive behind a subscription. Constants is built around a single page that can hold a membership alongside a shop, a booking calendar, event tickets, and every social link a creator already has, all under one handle and one fee structure. A Substack subscription buys access to writing in an inbox; a Constants membership buys access to whatever a creator decides to gate, whether that is a private feed, gated posts, or a paid community layer sitting next to the products they already sell.

Where Substack Is Strong

Substack's advantage here is real and worth naming honestly: it is purpose-built for long-form writing, with a reading and email-delivery experience a general link-in-bio tool was never designed to replicate, and the built-in Substack Network puts new writers in front of an existing pool of readers already primed to subscribe to something. That distribution is hard to match for a creator whose entire product is the writing itself, which is exactly the case where a Constants membership earns its place instead, for creators whose subscription is one piece of a bigger page rather than the whole business.

Which One Fits Your Page

Pick Substack if the product really is a newsletter and nothing else, text-first and email-delivered, with the paywall as the entire business model. Pick Constants if the subscription needs to sit next to a shop, a booking calendar, or a link-in-bio page a creator is already building out. Plenty of creators end up running both: write on Substack, then link the subscribe page from a Constants bio alongside everything else being sold, with the full breakdown on the pricing page.