Migration guide
Substack → Kit
Substack takes 10% of paid subscription revenue plus Stripe fees forever. At $1,000/mo recurring revenue that's $1,200/yr, growing with you. Kit charges a flat monthly fee that scales with list size, not with how much money you make.
Published · By the TierGauge editorial team
When this migration makes sense
- You have or expect to have $500/mo+ in paid subscription revenue.
- You want to sell digital products or courses alongside the newsletter without standing up Stripe + a separate cart.
- You want tag-based subscriber organization instead of a single flat list.
When it doesn't
- You depend on Substack's discovery network and the Notes/recommendations system.
- You have under 1,000 subscribers and are not yet monetizing; Substack's 10%-of-zero is fine.
- You actively rely on Substack's reader app and built-in commenting community.
What you lose by leaving Substack
- Substack's discovery (Notes, recommendations, the homepage trending list).
- Built-in podcast hosting from Substack.
- The reader app and the community/commenting that exists inside it.
What you gain with Kit
- No revenue share. The 10% Substack tax is gone.
- Tag-based subscriber organization (Substack is one big list).
- A real visual automation builder for sequences and behavioral triggers.
- Free landing pages, forms, and digital-product checkout in one tool.
Step-by-step migration
- 01
Export your list from Substack
Pull a fresh CSV of every active subscriber. Capture the fields you actually use downstream: email is required, name is standard, signup date and tier (free/paid) are useful when Substack provides them.
- 02
Provision Kit
Sign up, set sender identity, and verify your sending domain (DKIM, SPF, DMARC). Do this before importing the list; sending from an unverified domain is the single fastest way to land in spam at the moment of cutover.
- 03
Import the list and map fields
Upload the CSV. Map email + name + any custom fields. Decide whether to import as one list or split into segments/tags. Substack-style organization rarely maps 1:1, so plan the split before the upload, not after.
- 04
Rebuild automations and templates
Kit's automation builder is structurally similar but won't import Substack's flows directly. Rebuild only what you actively use; the move is a chance to delete the unused ones rather than lift-and-shift dead infrastructure.
- 05
Send a test broadcast
Pick a small segment and send a real broadcast (not just a preview). Verify deliverability, link clicks, and unsubscribe flow. If anything's off, you find it before the announcement, not after.
- 06
Announce the move and cut over
Send your last broadcast from Substack announcing the new sender domain and what to expect. Cut over DNS and sending from Kit on the same day, not staggered. A dual-send week creates more confusion than it prevents.
Substack-to-Kit specific gotchas
Universal steps cover most of the work. These are the failure modes unique to this exact pair.
-
#1
Substack's paid-subscription billing is migrated as a list, not as active subscriptions; paying readers re-subscribe via Kit's commerce setup. Plan a clear, dated communication window.
-
#2
Substack export is a CSV with email + name only. Subscription dates, free/paid status, and tags do not export cleanly; reconstruct what you need before the cutover.
-
#3
Custom domains on Substack point at Substack's infrastructure. Switch DNS only after Kit is fully set up to avoid a delivery gap.
Common questions
- Is Kit cheaper than Substack?
- Both start at the same headline price (Free). The reason to migrate is the pricing model and feature scope, not the entry-tier number.
- Will I lose subscribers in the move?
- Email lists transfer as raw addresses; subscriber relationships transfer with you because the addresses haven't changed. What you can lose: re-engagement (some readers won't notice the new sender domain immediately), paid subscriptions if Substack handles billing differently from Kit (the gotchas above call out the specific cases), and any "engagement" or warmth signals that Substack's deliverability inferred from your sending history. Plan a clear announcement and a deliverability warm-up week.
- How long does the migration take?
- For a list under 10,000 subscribers, a clean migration is one focused week: domain setup and verification, list import, automation rebuild, test broadcast, announcement, cutover. Larger lists or complex automations can stretch to 2 or 3 weeks. The constraint is rarely the import itself; it's the deliverability warm-up and the time to rebuild flows you actually depend on.
Sources
- Substack: https://substack.com/going-paid
- Kit: https://kit.com/pricing
Pricing verified . Migration mechanics are based on the public pricing pages and standard ESP migration patterns; verify destructive steps (DNS cutover, paid subscription transfer) against the vendor's current docs before executing.