Substack subscriptions in the iOS app: inflated prices and a new “walled garden” for newsletters

If you host a paid newsletter on Substack, pay attention to the platform’s new in-app subscription offering for iOS. The company published a long FAQ about the change.

Apple requires all apps that sell digital content to use its in-app payment system — the one that charges a 15–30% fee. Substack relied on a loophole created by the recent Epic Games ruling in the US to make its iOS app compliant with App Store rules, giving iOS users the (default) option to subscribe via the web and avoid Apple’s fee.

The problem is that this exception applies only to the United States.

Everywhere else, Substack’s iOS app offers only Apple’s payment system, which creates two unappealing choices for paid newsletter publishers on the platform:

• Increase subscription prices dynamically to cover Apple’s fee. This results in higher prices for readers.
• Keep prices identical across platforms, which means absorbing the 30% loss on subscriptions made through the iOS app.

There are other drawbacks, like the longer payout delay for payments processed through Apple (45 days) and the inability to export those subscriptions out of Substack.

The risk that I’ve long warned about — getting locked into Substack — now unfolds into being locked into two platforms: Substack and Apple. (As Isabelle put it, Substack has effectively delivered its users onto Apple.