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Comment by joemaller1 | Hacker News Reader

All I really want from Substack is an all-you-can-eat model where I pay a base fee and they sort out who gets what based on what I read. It can’t be that hard, lynda.com did it ages ago and was always profitable.

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This is the reason I never paid for any substack subscription.

There are about 15 authors I'm willing to support in some way, but not $5/month for any of them individually. I don't even mind if they kept some articles restricted. It could be that I can "unlock" 10 premium articles per month for $10/mon, the main thing is I want to control what I contribute. $75/mon is too much.

This is the issue from the consumer point of view. For most people, it's too expensive to subscribe to more than a few (like less than 5) writers on Substack, and that excludes the newsletters that have the really high-expertised content (which tend to be quite expensive on a standalone basis, as one would expect). This makes sense for the writers, but as a consumer, it's very limited. I personally only read a few Substacks because I don't want to spend the money to subscribe to more than a few of them, given other subscription costs already being incurred elsewhere. No doubt many other potential readers are in a similar position.

> want from Substack is an all-you-can-eat model where I pay a base fee and they sort out who gets what based on what I read

This doesn’t work for high-cost content. Ultimately, if a writer can’t find readers who find their work worth the friction of paying for it, I’m not sure they’re adding value going solo.

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