Everything You Need to Know About Substack Pledges
How they work and one urgent action you need to do immediately
Hi Substacker,
In this post, I explain what the Pledges feature is on Substack and why you urgently need to review it and — perhaps — take action to prevent it from trashing your newsletter.
What are Substack Pledges?
A ‘pledge’ is a promise. The Substack Pledge feature is a way for you, as a newsletter writer, to see if your free readers are willing to pay for your work, without turning on paid subscriptions.
With pledges, your readers promise to become paying subscribers in the future, by committing to a monthly or yearly subscription and entering their credit card number.
How do Substack Pledges work?
Pledges are an automatic feature that is active by default on all free Substack newsletters.
Wait what?! I’m asking for pledges right now, without doing anything?!
Yup that’s right, starting January 2023, every new reader of your newsletter is being asked to pledge money as soon as they sign up.
New readers are asked to pledge immediately after they enter their email address, before they have seen any of your work.
After a new subscriber enters their email address to subscribe to your publication they are shown a screen that asks them to pledge their support. The screen offers them the option to promise $80 for a year’s subscription, $8 for a month, $150 for ‘founding’ or to opt-out. There is a box for them to enter their credit card number immediately, and if they don’t enter their card number or explicitly opt-out, then they cannot get to your post or home page.
As a publication owner, you can change the prices from their default values, with the minimum allowed amounts being US$5 per month and $50 per year. You can also switch currencies if desired.
Current subscribers to a free newsletter also see buttons asking for pledges on your home page and in place of ‘Subscribe’ buttons within posts.
Current subscribers see a pledge button on the publication’s homepage when the Pledges feature is active
The problem with Pledges
The process of asking new readers to promise money for a newsletter they (perhaps) have never read feels aggressive to me.
On the other hand, paid newsletters have the same aggressive request for money immediately after the sign-up page too, and readers don’t seem to mind too much, they just opt out.
With that in mind, perhaps the upfront pledge request is not all bad. But that really depends on the type of newsletter.
Some newsletters exist for the joy of writing and reading, to inform, to entertain, to share news, to build communities. These newsletters have built-in value. Creating such newsletters takes time, effort and commitment, and creators deserve to be rewarded for that.
I have no problem with pledges for newsletters that are purely for entertainment, education, information-sharing and community building. If the newsletter is good, people will pay. Or with Pledges, promise to pay in future. Not all people will pay, not even most people, but some will, and that’s awesome.
But other newsletters — many, many other email newsletters — are not built on pure motives of entertainment and joy. And pledges don’t belong there. In fact, on such newsletters, they are an abomination!
The ‘other’ newsletters I refer to were created to generate income indirectly. One of the world’s biggest and most famous email newsletters is published by James Clear. It is always free and always will be. It exists to promote Clear’s books and increase the readership of his other work. That type of newsletter should NEVER ask its readers to pay.
When I launched this publication, it initially existed to help sell my book. I did not ask for pledges because at the time, it was essentially a marketing tool for the book. Asking people to pay, or to make a pledge, just wouldn’t have felt right.
Should you use the Pledges feature?
Heads up!, the Pledges feature is enabled by default, for all free Substack publications. That means you are probably already using Pledges unless you have manually switched it off.
To switch off Pledges, go to the Settings tab on your dashboard, navigate to the Payments section and toggle the button. If you can’t see the pledges toggle, then you have probably already got payments active on your publication; Pledges are only available to free newsletters.
Use Pledges if you can say yes to 3 questions:
Does your newsletter exist for its own sake, to entertain, inform or build community (and it isn’t used to promote other products or services)?
Has your newsletter got at least 5 long-form posts or at least ten short-form posts?
Have you explained who you are and why your newsletter exists in your About page, your bio and a separate post?
It is not good to ask people to promise money if you haven’t explained why you created your newsletter, or have only published one or two posts, and doing so risks turning potential fans away or damaging your personal brand.
So, if you can’t answer Yes to the three questions above, turn off Pledges until you can.
The benefits of Pledges
If your goal is to earn revenue from paid subscriptions, then you will need to start asking for payments at some point. It’s hard to know the best time to do that. Do you wait until you have 1000 subscribers? Or do you start asking for money from day one? What if no one wants to pay?
Substack has created the Pledges feature to help you feel confident to turn on payments. According to their post announcing the feature, “thousands of readers have pledged almost a million dollars to writers they love” since the feature was enabled for a small selection of writers in December 2022.
When someone makes a pledge, they are prompted to leave a private message for the writer too.
“You deserve to get paid for your work. You are putting valuable time and energy into what you produce, and we all get to sit back in delight each week as we read.” [Private message from a reader who promised $80 per year during the trial run of the Pledges feature.]
Messages like this will warm your heart. Even better, they can give you the confidence you need to turn on payments and start earning money from your newsletter.
If you have a free newsletter and plan to switch on paid subscriptions one day, then the Pledges feature will help you to see how much you could earn. Better yet, when you do switch on payments you will hit the ground running, with money from readers who have already promised to pay.
Urgent Action Required Now
If you have a free Substack newsletter and you don’t want to use Pledges, then you need to manually switch it off.
You can find the Pledges feature in the payments section of the settings tab on your publication’s dashboard. If you can’t see it, that’s probably because you already have payments enabled; the Pledges feature is not available for newsletters with active payments.
Takeaways
The Pledges feature is a default feature on all free Substack newsletters. It automatically asks readers to show their financial support for a newsletter by prompting readers to ‘pledge’ (= promise) to pay a monthly, yearly or ‘founding member’ amount when the newsletter goes paid.
The newsletter owner can choose the amount of the pledge but it cannot be less than $5 per month and $30 per year.
When the Pledges feature is active, readers see requests for pledges on your Substack home page, on ‘subscribe’ buttons in posts and emails and when they first enter their email to subscribe to your publication.
Pledges = confidence
My advice: Pledges don’t belong on marketing newsletters or newsletters that make money from advertising or affiliate links.
Pledges are enabled by default and must be switched off manually. They are not available to newsletters that already have payments switched on.
Need more help with your Substack publication?
If you want to learn more about Substack and how I use it to earn money, check out my other articles, get in touch with me directly using the DM button below and be sure to subscribe to get helpful information like this straight to your inbox each week.
Excellent article. Yes, I had a friend who was very annoyed at having to pledge even though no money changed hands. As a newby, it was not a good time to ask for pledges. It took me some time to work out how to manually switch off pledges. I would never have known except my friend emailed me! Pity I hadn't read your article at the time.
Good article. A year or so ago, I had someone pledge ana annual amount ($50) to me. When I went paid recently, I had to add one dollar to my required annual amount so she would not get charged. I didn't think it was fair, and there was no way for me to refuse the pledge.
Substack's a funny creature, sometimes.