Why Can’t Writers Seem to Quit Substack?

Scratch interviews three writers who left Substack for Beehiiv or Ghost, with the numbers attached: actual monthly platform costs, subscriber attrition, what the migration broke. The useful bit is Frankie de la Cretaz on Substack’s deliberately bad data export, and the recurring point that “discoverability” is partly a story the platform tells you so you don’t leave. I’ll say it again: be sceptical of platform analytics! Reading this as I think through where a gated, paid-subscription project of my own should live (I have something in the pipeline).