Newsletter on Substack — single family newsletter, free tier, 10% if paid

decision Sun Jun 21 2026 00:00:00 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) decisionnewslettersubstacksingle-newsletterfamily-wide

Newsletter on Substack

The decision

ONE newsletter for the entire family. On Substack. Free tier. URL: chirag127.substack.com initially; can move to a brand-aligned custom domain (newsletter.oriz.in) later — Substack supports custom domains on the free tier.

Why single, not per-app

• Per-app newsletters fragment the audience
• Discovery: one signup, all content
• Maintenance: one ESM stack to keep healthy, one set of legal pages (unsubscribe + privacy)
• The family is one brand — Oriz — not 24 brands

What it ships

• Daily blog feed — auto-cross-posted from blog.oriz.in RSS (Substack supports RSS-to-newsletter import on free)
• Weekly digest — manual write-up summarising the week
• Book drop announcements — when a new book or sample chapter ships per [[decisions/content/books-publishing-shape]]

Why Substack (vs Buttondown + EmailOctopus split)

This decision supersedes [[decisions/content/newsletter-split-buttondown-emailoctopus]] (which split by audience: Buttondown for tech, EmailOctopus for marketing). Two ESPs = double the surface area for ~zero benefit at our scale.

Substack:

• Free tier with 0 send limits — Buttondown free caps at 100 subs, EmailOctopus at 2.5K
• Discovery built-in — Substack network surfaces newsletter to its audience
• No card on file for free tier; 10% only triggers if a paid tier is added in the future (accepted vs DIY-ESM cost)
• Custom domain supported on free
• Authoring UX — markdown-friendly, web editor, mobile app

Drawback accepted: 10% revenue cut if a paid tier ever ships. Mitigation: the bulk of family revenue is ad/affiliate/book/sponsorship, not newsletter-subscription.

Embed locations

Signup form embedded on:

• home-app footer
• Every content-app footer (tabs, journal, lore, blog, books, cs-me)
• Per-book page on books.oriz.in ("Get notified when the next book ships")

Cross-refs

• Supersedes the Buttondown/EmailOctopus split ? [[decisions/content/newsletter-split-buttondown-emailoctopus]]
• Blog cross-post strategy (RSS feed ? Substack) ? [[decisions/content/blog-cross-post-strategy]]
• Book drops shipped via newsletter ? [[decisions/content/books-publishing-shape]]
• Monetisation matrix slot ? [[policy/monetisation-channel-matrix]]