Twitter Subscriptions and New Substack Price

Some housekeeping things

Up until now, a subscription to this newsletter cost $10 a month, or $100 a year. For that, you got access to:

• AMAs

• Discussion threads about articles

• Biweekly or monthly links

• Occasional early releases of the podcast

• Discounts on meetings

The links have always been in competition with Twitter, but frankly Twitter is a better format for them. I find it much preferable to react to something in the moment when it’s fresh in my mind, rather than store it away somewhere and go back to it weeks later. It’s all about being in the flow.

Twitter used to reject me for all their cool features, treating me as if I wasn’t wanted on the platform. With the change in management, they’ve actually reached out and made me feel like a valued member of the community. Now that some trust has been established, I’m going to start posting links on Twitter and charging $3/month for subscriptions. To subscribe, just go to my profile and click on the upper right corner, as shown in the Tweet below.

Richard Hanania @RichardHanania

I’ve opened up Twitter subscriptions for $3/month. I think I’ll use it for *takes too long for a normal tweet, too short for a Substack *live tweeting of events, like debates, etc *newslinks and analysis *2024 coverage *other things that for whatever reason I don't want to… https://t.co/9ufzV4XlUr

You pay through Stripe, just like you do with Substack, so it’s all very easy.

While opening up Twitter subscriptions, I don’t want to make things too expensive for anyone. Therefore, I’m reducing the Substack subscription rate to $7/month, or $70/year. This way, things are just as they were before, where you get access to everything I produce for $10/month. I’ll keep tweeting ungated stuff too.

I know it isn’t ideal to break subscriptions up across two platforms. Nonetheless, I think this is the best way to go forward, given that Substack and Twitter both have different strengths.

That being said, there’s a new product called Substack Notes, which functions a lot like Twitter.

Introducing Substack Notes

Right now, there’s no way to put up Notes that are paid subscription only, but I’ve been told that they are working on creating that option. When they do, I plan to start posting Notes for paid subscribers related to my articles. This will include reactions to comments and other authors, or further thoughts that came to me after writing a piece. None of this is set in stone, and in ambiguous cases where a message may be appropriate for either platform, I’ll to a large extent be going off feels in determining what belongs on Notes and what should be paywalled on Twitter.

To summarize, then, so everything is clear:

• $7/month or $70/year on Substack gets you the same things you got before, minus the links, which are being discontinued, but plus Substack Notes that are followups on articles when the option to make Notes available to paid subscribers only is rolled out.

• $3/month gets you access to gated Tweets, which will take over the function of the old links, and also include things like livetweeting newsworthy events, short blog-like posts, and other miscellaneous things.

• Access to everything I do or write across all platforms remains at $10/month.

Anyway, I’d appreciate any feedback. I think that the way this works is if you currently have a monthly subscription it’ll automatically be reduced to $7/month. If you paid for a year in advance already, I’m pretty sure there’s no easy way to undo that but I can look into it if there’s real demand. I wish there was an option to give people who prepaid for a year on Substack at the old price free Twitter subscriptions, but there doesn’t appear to be any way to do that.