How to price your subscriptions, membership and sponsorships

Publishers often pick arbitrary prices, but having a well thought-out strategy that aligns with your audience and goals can help you grow your business and earn trust.

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You’ve selected a topic, a name, a schedule, a platform and a design for your newsletter, podcast or website. Next comes the tricky part — deciding how much to charge, whether for subscriptions, membership, sponsorship or other services.

There is no single standard for how much to charge for a subscription to a paid newsletter. Set your price too high, and you may scare people off. Set it too low, and you could lose out on some potential revenue. Too often, publishers pick price points arbitrarily. But having a well thought-out strategy that aligns with your goals and fits your audience can help you earn money to keep your business healthy, while also helping you grow your subscription base and build trust with your readers.

In this case study, creators Alicia Kennedy, Priti Patnaik, Tanmoy Goswami, JR Raphael and Amanda Cua share their successful pricing strategies.

Key takeaways include:

• Collect pricing reference points. No idea what to charge for your newsletter subscriptions or sponsorships? Look at what other newsletters in categories similar to yours are charging.
• Tailor your price to your audience, goals, and offerings.
• Survey your readers/clients for their input on reasonable rates.
• Experiment with variable price points. Offer occasional discounts or promotions.

A pricing strategy is the method you use to decide what to charge for your newsletter, membership, sponsorships, or services.

Common pricing strategies include:

• Cost-plus pricing — You set your price by calculating the cost of creating your product or providing your service and adding a fixed percentage markup on top of that.
• Hourly pricing — You bill by the time it takes to complete a service.
• Project-based pricing — You bill by the project instead of by the hour.
• Competitive pricing — You set your price based on what your competitors are charging for similar products.
• Value-based pricing — You set your prices based on how much people are willing to pay for your product and the perceived market value.
• Penetration pricing — You set your price lower than competitors when you first go into business in order to beat out your competitors and capture a larger market share.
• Economy pricing — You price your newsletter, product, or service at a lower price point to have a higher volume of buyers.
• Premium and freemium pricing — You market your newsletter, product or service as a premium of high value and price accordingly.
• Bundle pricing— You package products or services together and offer them collectively at a discount.

The pricing models you choose will depend on your product or content, your audience, and your competition. For more on pricing strategies, see Mailchimp’s helpful guide.

Newsletter expert Dan Oshinsky and writer Alex Hazlett of Inbox Collective recently looked at five different types of newsletters, and the corresponding business models and pricing approaches for each type.

They identified five primary types of indie newsletters run by solo creators: The analyst, the curator, the expert, the reporter, and the writer.

The analyst format is driven by paid subscriptions or memberships. Readers pay for exclusive content, and subscriptions range from $100 to $200 per year. If readers get access to premium content plus an exclusive community, rates are often higher.

Curators aggregate content from various sources into a single newsletter. They often earn money through native ads, sponsorships, and classified ads. Oshinsky says native ads are priced anywhere from $15 to $50 per 1,000 readers. Classified ad prices range from $25 to $200 for a short blurb or link in such ads.

Experts produce original content and interact with their communities. Oshinsky says they often make money through selling their books, courses, or consulting services.

Reporter newsletters cover beats like local news or a sports team. These often earn revenue through paid subscriptions, membership programs, advertising, and events. Pricing depends on the niche, Oshinsky says, with $50 to $150 a year being the typical price range.

Writer newsletters provide a platform for authors to share their work. Oshinsky says some writers offer these newsletters for free to promote their books, while others monetize their audience by charging $50 to $100 a year for access to essays or other original content.

Alicia Kennedy, creator of the food and culture newsletter From the Desk of Alicia Kennedy, doesn’t want to give readers sticker shock with the subscription rates for her newsletter about food The mainstay of her newsletter, her Monday essays about some aspect of the food world, are free. Paid subscribers receive a recipe on Fridays. She charges $5 per month, or $30 per year, for a subscription. Her advice is to be normal and not ask of others what you wouldn’t want asked of yourself.

“I keep it really cheap. I don’t want it to be an excessive expense for someone,” Kennedy says. “It’s not a reflection of what it’s worth. I’d rather pursue volume in terms of subscriptions than just have a few people who could afford it. High prices just encourage too small an audience and I don’t want that.”

Kennedy says she thinks the low price point encourages more people to subscribe. “There’s not a huge barrier to entry,” she says. “I’m not trying to make 500 grand. As a writer, I just want to continue to work and continue to have my job.”

Kennedy said people get lots of recipes for a small amount. “People only spend $30 a year, and they get three unique recipes per month. I don’t think they can be upset about that,” she says. “They’re paying pennies per recipe. The yearly cost is the cost of a cookbook.”

The low price also takes some of the pressure off when it comes to weeks when she is extremely busy and doesn’t have a recipe for the Friday edition. She will post a discussion thread instead some of those weeks, or write about her thoughts on cabbage or tofu.

People can voluntarily pay more on Substack, but Kennedy says readers rarely select that option.

Kennedy says that there are other benefits to the newsletter for her career and earnings.

“It does my writing a service to have a newsletter as this base,” she says. “A lot of the time writers don’t really understand because Substack has been so positioned as the place to make money. They think that if they’re not going to make money at it, then it’s not a worthwhile pursuit. It can be a really worthwhile pursuit even with just making it a showcase for your voice. If you post an update once a month with an essay or something like that, it keeps your voice and your perspective in people’s minds.”

Kennedy has barely had to pitch a story in the last couple of years, and no longer feels the pressure to accept every assignment that comes her way. “Editors come to me and so that’s been huge,” she says. “It’s helped me to break into markets that I never thought I would break into. I have a piece coming up in Foreign Policy. As a food writer, you’d never really think about pitching magazines like Foreign Policy. It’s been a huge boon to my career in that way, being this kind of launching pad for my work to a wider audience.”

Priti Patnaik, founder of the global health newsletter Geneva Health Files, says she experimented before settling on a price for her newsletter and also conducted surveys. She was accepting donations via PayPal before she started charging on Substack. “One indicator was the donations I received prior to going paid,” she says. “That was a price point.”

Patnaik also was confident that she was offering something unique for an audience of experts who needed the information for their professional work, so she was aggressive with her pricing. She charges 15 Euros ($15)a month, or 150 Euros (~$148) a year, for paid subscriptions. Core supporters who pay 500 Euros, or about $495, a year receive a special monthly edition of the newsletter.

Her approach and advice to others is to price aggressively and scale back as necessary, “Almost always, we are underpricing,” Patnaik says. “Even now I feel I am underpricing if I take into account production costs in Switzerland. But because what we write is also relevant for developing countries, we cannot go too high.”

JR Raphael, founder of the newsletter Android Intelligence, writes and produces his newsletter about the Android operating system himself. As his business has grown, he has increased his offerings for paid subscribers, who are called platinum members. This has meant a lot more work, and the need to hire others. Last fall, he hired a freelance contractor to help him with some logistical things. In April, he also hired a full-time communications manager who is handling marketing, partner relations, and advertising.

“I was reaching a point where this became a legitimate standalone full time business and it was far more than one person could be doing,” Raphael says. “Also, marketing and advertising are not my background. On top of that, I am still writing for external publications. So it was like doing five jobs at once. I finally said okay, something has got to give here.”

More work and more expenses to pay others meant a need to raise prices for paid subscribers. Early on in 2018, Raphael charged platinum members $5 a month or $55 a year. He chose the price points by looking at what others were charging at the time.

“At that point, when the premium program didn’t have a whole lot to it, I started out at what seemed to be a pretty typical price,” Raphael says of the $5 a month cost. “That just really seemed to be and to some degree probably still is the expected standard for a premium newsletter-oriented product. But over the years as the benefits around our premium membership continued to grow and grow, and we went from just being the beefed up version of the Friday newsletter with some extra content to being a full fledged resource community, with a help desk, guide books, the podcast, and more recently discounted or free premium apps and services, it became clear to me that the value had way outgrown the cost.”

Raphael didn’t want to continue raising prices every couple of months. “I just let the price stay because it wasn’t really intended to be a business at the beginning,” he says. “Over time, it became clear that an adjustment needed to be made.”

Raphael decided to survey existing members and ask them for their thoughts on pricing adjustments. “The vast, overwhelming majority of people said that they would be delighted to pay even twice what they were paying at that point, when given different tiers and asked what they would be willing to pay and what seemed reasonable,” he says. “A staggering number of people were completely fine with the top top tier proposal, with many even saying it seems like a steal and I should charge more.”

His goal was to increase the price but feel good about it in terms of how he treated his members. He decided to increase the price to $95 a year. “It wasn’t a big jump from where it was, but in my mind, I saw it as an overdue correction,” he says.

To make the transition easier, Raphael told existing members that if the price increase would not work for them for any reason or would be a hardship, they could reach out to him and let him know, and he would work with them to come up with a price. “I was trying to correct the price for what the program had grown into for the future, but for anyone who had been a supporter at that point, especially the ones who had been with me from the beginning, their presence means more than the numbers on the spreadsheet,” he says.

“There weren’t a ton of people who took advantage of that offer, but there were some, and it worked out nicely because this way I kind of adjusted it without making anyone feel like ‘Gosh, he’s doubling the price. How can he do this?’ This way everybody kind of ended up happy and anyone coming in knew that’s just what the pricing was, and they could evaluate for themselves.”

Tanmoy Goswami, founder of the mental health newsletter Sanity by Tanmoy, keeps all of his content free. His loyal base of readers pay for a subscription because they want to support his work. “At Substack they always tell their writers that you should always keep your best content free, because that becomes your sort of brand ambassador and then you use it to convert people to paying subscribers. Even if they hadn’t said that I would have still done it because I was clear from day one that the work that I do exists in public interest,” Goswami says. “A lot of my readers would not be able to pay even $5 a month. Even today, everything is free. You just have to sign up.”

More than a year and a half after he started his newsletter, Goswami does wonder sometimes about putting some content behind a paywall. He wants to see how long he can go without doing that. He is hesitant to do so because of the pandemic and the economy. An annual subscription to Sanity by Tanmoy is 5,000 rupees a year, or about $61.

“Paying for a newsletter is a discretionary spend. And a lot of people don’t have jobs or are struggling with other things, and people can’t afford things anymore,” he says of the free option and the annual subscription rate for people who want to support his work.

More newsletter creators seem to be having success these days with paid sponsorships or ads. Raphael says sponsorships comprise a little more of his revenue than memberships, but both are very important for the health of his business.

“I think it would be a lot harder to have this exist as a business without those two different pillars supporting it,” he says. “It depends on the scale of the company. There are obviously some newsletter businesses on a much larger scale that can thrive on advertising alone or membership alone. But for me, having the two revenue sources has been a big part of what’s allowed Android Intelligence to grow and thrive and be able to support itself.”

In the beginning, Raphael deliberately set his sponsorship rates very low. “I really didn’t have any point of reference or way of knowing what to expect in terms of performance and results,” he says. “For me, the sponsorship stuff has always been more about long-term relationships with the right brands than any sort of fast cash grab, so I preferred the notion of under promising and over delivering than the alternative.”

To his surprise, he sold out the first quarter of sponsorships within a matter of days. “I was able to use the performance from those early sponsorships as a gauge for better calculating a fair and reasonable rate from that point forward and then continuing to adjust it based on ongoing growth,” Raphael says.

“Many of those early sponsors are still regular partners today, and I’ve continued to book out sponsorships a quarter at a time in that same pattern — albeit now with rates that are carefully considered and with plenty of real-world data behind them.”Do your market research

Amanda Cua, the founder of the newsletter BackScoop, a year-old publication that covers business and technology in Southeast Asia, earns revenue through paid sponsorships. She does not have a membership program. To determine what she should charge for sponsorships, she did a lot of research first.

Cua looked at newsletter ad rates across different sectors and peers at similar publications. She took into account their location as well. “I did a computation of all of that, and figured out the pricing looking at how many subscribers they have. What kind of people are their audience? Where are they located?,” Cua says. “I looked at all of that and factored all those details into the price, because obviously the price will be higher if it’s only targeted to, let’s say, private banking executives versus, say, a publication for businesses in Asia. Obviously it’s going to be very different.”

That analysis helped her come up with her initial pricing. “I think the most important thing is to pick a price and not try to make it too cheap,” she says. “It’s some advice I got from different media founders in the region. They always told me don’t undersell yourself. That was super common among people. So I did the computations. And then I picked the price.”

Cua acknowledged there can be a tricky psychology to pricing. If you are too cheap, sometimes people don’t perceive you as having value. “You don’t seem to have good quality then if the price is too, too low,” she says. “I also think it’s easier to lower the price later than to raise the price later.”

Who Sponsors Stuff has created a newsletter ad calculator to help you figure out your newsletter sponsorship rates based on your list size and open rates.

Raphael says he saw the need to write a formal ethics policy for his newsletter recently so readers understand his ethical standards. ‘People ask questions, and there are so many misconceptions out there, especially in tech journalism, in large part because there are a lot of people who do slightly shady stuff from a traditional journalistic perspective,” he says.

“I wanted to be transparent about what we do and don’t do. As part of that, what I wanted to be exceptionally transparent about too was that anything that is not in some way marked as sponsored or in partnership is not sponsored, paid content. If I’m recommending an app or talking about a service, it is because I find it to be interesting, worthwhile, and valuable. I’m not getting anything out of it. There are no affiliate links. If it doesn’t say sponsored, it is just me talking to you.”He says he also makes a point of not working with sponsors where there could be even the perception of a conflict of interest. “It would be a really great fit and they would get fantastic results if Google advertised in the newsletter, or Samsung advertised, but how can I possibly write about those companies from an objective perspective in the newsletter itself or in any of the external publications? Raphael says. “It’s just a line I’m not comfortable crossing, so I’ve tried to establish and find my own boundaries and lines, figuring out what works.”

The revenue you can expect to generate from membership will be heavily dependent on your pricing model and pricing tiers. The Membership Puzzle Project offers helpful tips on deciding how much to charge for your memberships.

Dan Oshinsky and Alex Hazlett take an in-depth look at the five types of indie newsletter business models in an August 2022 Inbox Collective article.

ConvertKit has a helpful primer on paid newsletter pricing.

For more on newsletter advertising prices, Swapstack has helpful advice that details how to price ads based on CPO (cost per 1,000 opens), a flat rate, and flat rate packages.

This is one of six new case studies published by J+, the professional development arm of the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY. We support independent journalists building their own newsletters, podcasts, and other niche projects with training and analyses of what works in this new media ecosystem. This case study was supported with funding from the Meta Journalism Project. It was written by Krystal Knapp, an alumna of the Entrepreneurial Journalism Creators Program.