Paid newsletter platform for creators and publishers

How paid newsletters work

A paid newsletter has two kinds of reader: free ones and paying ones. You write issues for everyone, for paid readers only, or a mix. The paying readers pay a monthly or yearly price through a payment provider, and what they get in return is the issues you reserve for them. A newsletter platform's job is to take the payment, keep track of who is paying, and send the right issue to the right people.

Subscriptions on FlockStack

• Up to 3 paid tiers per newsletter, lowest first. Each has a name, a description, benefits and the prices it asks: monthly, quarterly (every 3 months), yearly, lifetime (one payment that never renews) and pay what you want.
• A free trial of up to 90 days before a new subscriber's first charge, if you want one. A trial can ask for no card until it ends.
• One currency for the prices, from USD, EUR, GBP, CAD, AUD, NZD, CHF, SEK, NOK and DKK. Prices start at 100 in the currency's smallest unit.
• A subscribe page on the newsletter's website, which opens once your payments are set up and the website is live, after your first issue.
• Offers: a discount (a percentage or an amount off, once, for some months or for good) or a free trial, each with a link of its own that shows the discounted price and applies it at checkout.
• Founding members: a tier with a cap on how many it takes, and an optional list of supporters on the subscribe page.
• Pledges: before you open the paid tier, readers can pledge a price and save a card with nothing charged. You decide when charging starts, and every pledger is told a few days ahead and can cancel with one click.
• Gifts and comps: a reader can give 1, 3, 6 or 12 months of a tier to someone, and you can give paid access by hand until a day you choose.
• Price changes make a new price for new subscribers; people already subscribed keep the one they signed up on.

Payments through Stripe

Readers pay with Stripe Checkout. On FlockStack Cloud you connect your own Stripe account from the Payments page, through Stripe Connect, using a Standard account, so Stripe holds your money, your refunds and your disputes in your own dashboard. Charges are made on your account, not on FlockStack's. A self-hosted server charges with its owner's own Stripe key instead.

Stripe decides who can pay and how: FlockStack doesn't limit countries or payment methods itself, so what your Stripe account supports applies. You need a Stripe account that can take charges, and a bank account added in Stripe to be paid out. Selling works on every FlockStack plan, the Free plan included.

Free and paid readers

• A reader is paid while Stripe says their subscription is active or in its trial, until the end of the period they paid for. A failed renewal makes them free at once, and a successful payment later brings them back.
• Only a subscription made through FlockStack's own checkout counts. Subscriptions created anywhere else are ignored.
• A campaign goes to everyone, to free readers only, or to paid readers only, or to one tier and the tiers above it. The audience is checked again when the email is sent, so someone whose subscription ended since you queued it doesn't get the paid issue.
• The list cleanup never sets a paying reader aside as dormant.
• Segments and automations can use a reader's tier, and an automation can start when a reader upgrades or downgrades.

How paid issues reach readers

• The issue goes by email, whole, to paid readers only.
• On the web, a paid issue shows a short teaser, its first words up to about 320 characters, with a button to subscribe.
• The RSS feed carries the full text of the free issues.
• Paid readers get a link in every email to manage their subscription, which opens Stripe's billing page: invoice history, payment method, and cancelling at the end of the period.

Fees

FlockStack takes no cut of what you sell. It sets no application fee on a sale, and its code refuses to send one. That is the platform fee on your sales: zero.

It isn't the total cost of selling:

• Stripe's processing fee comes off each payment. Its rates depend on your country and the payment method, so FlockStack doesn't quote one: see Stripe's own pricing.
• FlockStack's plan is separate. It is priced by the emails you send, and the Free plan costs nothing: what a newsletter costs on each plan.
• Taxes on your sales are yours to handle: the terms make you responsible for them, as for refunds and disputes.

Who owns the subscribers

• The payment relationship is yours. Paying readers are customers of your own Stripe account, and the money goes there.
• Your email list is exportable. Account export writes each newsletter's contacts as a CSV, and every issue as Markdown and HTML, and it works without a plan.
• What the export doesn't carry is who is paid and their Stripe IDs. Those stay in Stripe. The API does return each contact's paid status and the end of their paid period, and a segment can filter on a reader's tier.

FlockStack is open source under the AGPL-3.0 (github.com/ankurmans/flockstack), so the code that holds your readers and your sales is code you can read, and run yourself.

Moving a paid newsletter to FlockStack

You can import your whole list from another platform's CSV, and FlockStack reads the exports of beehiiv, Substack, Mailchimp, Kit, MailerLite, Buttondown, Ghost and EmailOctopus as they are. Your past issues can come too: moving from Substack, beehiiv, WordPress or Ghost shows how. What an import can't do is bring over paid subscriptions:

• Import reads the address, status, signup date and a few other columns. It has no paid status and no Stripe data, so a reader who pays on the old platform comes in as an ordinary active reader.
• FlockStack can't attach an existing Stripe subscription to a contact.
• So paying readers subscribe again, through your FlockStack subscribe page. A practical way: tag the import (for example paying-elsewhere), then send that segment a campaign that explains the move and links to the subscribe page.

Moving payments between Stripe accounts, and what to do with subscriptions on the old platform, is a matter for Stripe and the old platform.

Compared with platforms that take a share

Some newsletter platforms charge a percentage of what you earn. Substack's own page says writers keep 90% of their revenue, minus credit card fees. A percentage fee is cheapest when you earn little and gets larger as you earn more. A flat plan is the reverse. The Free plan costs nothing; against a platform that takes 10% and charges nothing else, FlockStack's smallest paid plan ($9 a month) costs the same as that 10% on $90 a month of subscription revenue: below that, the percentage is lower, and above it the plan is. Stripe's fees come off in both cases.

Look at the other things too: whether the platform lets you leave with your readers, whether it has an API, whether the features you need are on the plan you would pay for, and whether you can read and run its code.

Selling more than subscriptions

You can also sell digital products: a file up to 15 MB that readers buy once. It is stored privately and goes to the buyer by an emailed link that works for 7 days and up to 20 downloads, and stops working after a full refund or a chargeback. Each product gets a page on your newsletter's website.

Setting up the paid tiers, products and orders works from the API and the MCP server as well as the dashboard: the newsletter API lists the actions, and the selling documentation is the full reference, including the webhook events and the self-hosted setup.