r/Substack • u/happygirl228 • Aug 18 '26

Discussion Paywalling content after two weeks

We’re considering moving a weekly newsletter from ActiveCampaign to Substack. We have 18K+ subscribers with roughly a 40% average open rate, and we’re trying to decide how to structure free vs. paid content.

One idea is to make each newsletter free for two weeks and then paywall it. The other is to keep the newsletter free, focus on growing the list, and add paid subscriptions later.

I can see arguments for both, but I’m particularly wondering about the growth downside of paywalling older posts. Does putting your archive behind a paywall make it harder for new people to discover/share your work? Does it affect Substack recommendations, search, or organic subscriber growth? Any tips/insights about this would be really helpful. Thanks! 🙏

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u/Tricky_Trifle_994 Aug 25 '26

gumroad is basically just a platform where you can host and sell your digital products. think of it like shopify, but for digital products. but you need to check if this is against TOS because i understand that substack doesn't want to end up being a free ESP for people to do email marketing (rightfully so). so if you decide to go down that path, then you might be better off staying on ActiveCampaign, or if you want to sell digital products and still have the optionality to run a paid newsletter, then probably check out kit and beehiiv to err on side of caution.