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If you’re new, not yet a subscriber, or just plain missed it, here are some of our recent editions.

👾 Building Culture & Resilience. An interview with me, Bill Kerr, Founder & CEO at Athyna.
🌱 How Leaders Infuse AI Operationally. A collection of thoughts from a collection of leaders.
👾 People First Equity Plans. How we gave away 20% of Athyna and why I'd do it again.

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HOUSEKEEPING 📨

Fun fact: The awkward girl from The Pitt is Walter White's daughter in real life. How good is that?! Honestly, I love finding a second- or third-generation Hollywood link. It’s my guilty pleasure to look through someone’s Wikipedia page to find who their parents, grandparents, aunties and uncles were.

The Coppola is a great one: director Francis Ford Coppola, his sister and actress Talia Shire (from Rocky), children like director Sofia Coppola, and nephew Nicolas Cage. Jason Schwartzman, who appears in a lot of my favorite Wes Anderson films, is Talia Shire's son. The Coppolas are a good example, but there are so many. Now, onto today’s piece!

GUEST POST 💄

Substack Committed Creatorcide

Every artist, political pundit, and general out-and-out weirdo has a Substack today. Thanks to the email service providers’ first-ish mover advantage in the newsletter space, it is a relatively well-known player in media today. God knows how. Their platform is trash (I’ve used it); they have zero product development that is not entirely self-serving—and very little product development at all, to be fair—and some have even gone so far as to say they have/had a Nazi problem.

They are, as this pundit would put it, the most overrated company inside the creator economy today. And to add to that, they pulled the rug on their users in a massive way. All under the cover of darkness.

To dive into this story, my buddy Tyler is back. Tyler is the CEO of beehiiv and well-positioned to spill the beans on what this means for creators and how they will run their businesses moving forward. (He also runs the platform this very newsletter lives on, and he's thrown in a treat for you: use BILL30 to get 30% off for three months.) If you enjoy this, Tyler writes about building beehiiv on his personal newsletter, Big Desk Energy. It’s one of the emails I make sure to check out when he ships it out every week. Anyway, enjoy today’s piece!

But first, a little backstory

Hey team, Tyler from beehiiv here. Substack totally fucked their writers. Today, I’m going to tell you how. But before we get to that. I’d like to set the stage for how we actually got to where we are today.

You'll recall Facebook's sudden pivot that gutted publisher content back in 2018? Combined with their bullshit (and overblown) analytics, it straight-up annihilated media companies and sparked industry-wide job losses. Twitter jumped on the bandwagon, supposedly burying external links and rolling out fresh algorithm tweaks throughout 2023. All while media companies who've burned years kissing up to the algorithm overlords are suddenly racing to establish independent distribution—a scramble that's gone into overdrive now that AI's crashed the party.

The collapse of traditional media left the industry's best talent stranded. That's precisely why we created the beehiiv Media Collective—pouring millions into backing independent journalists. Funny thing is, Substack started with the exact same playbook but has completely abandoned that mission. They've morphed from a writer's toolkit into just another attention-harvesting social network.

They pivoted from ‘We're champions of writers’ to ‘We're building the Substack empire’ in record time. Here's the kicker, though—the motivations driving publishers versus social platforms are fundamentally incompatible:

• Zero ownership: These networks hold all the cards, controlling reader relationships while publishers get benched.

• Algorithm roulette: Your reach becomes a dice roll since platforms change the rules to benefit themselves.

• Identity death: Social networks strip away what makes publishers special, forcing everyone into the same bland template.

• Analytics blackout: Publishers get crumbs of data, making it impossible to truly know or connect with their readers.

If you've spent any time on Substack's platform, you'll spot these issues immediately—except here's the thing: they're not flaws; they're the whole damn point. Substack's running the textbook social media con, systematically stripping writers of their autonomy, brand, and freedom. And honestly? Given their sky-high 2021 valuation, this might be their only shot at making the math work.

Here’s the lowdown on the changes

Back in August 2025, Substack dropped a creator-economy bomb, announcing that every creator must now enable Apple's in-app purchasing. Translation: Apple's pocketing 30% from every subscription that comes through their payment rails on Substack. Insane.

Here's their so-called ‘solution’—Substack is automatically jacking up iOS prices to make sure creators get their original cut (basically, readers foot the bill). The kicker? This massive change got rammed through without any creator input or ability to say no. The comments on their announcement went exactly as well as you'd imagine.

Two months. That's all it took after Substack secured their $100M Series C for TCG (The Chernin Group) to start running their signature hustle—squeezing growth and cash out at any cost to the core mission. These are the exact folks who torched Food52, Hodinkee, and Cameo. Let's break this down:

• iOS users just got hit with a 30% price hike on Substack.

• Creators are stuck waiting 45 days for Apple payouts.

• Creators had zero input on a move that fundamentally impacts their revenue.

• You can't turn this shit off or work around it.

Sure, the massive fees are awful for literally everyone (except Apple and Substack), but obsessing over the percentages completely misses what's really happening here. This is way more calculated. Here's what's actually going down...

The golden shitty tinfoil handcuffs

Here's how things work today: Substack runs on Stripe's rails for payment processing. When creators sign up, they link up their personal Stripe accounts to the platform. This setup means creators keep ownership of payment data and customer relationships outside Substack's control.

When someone becomes a paid subscriber, they become a direct customer in the creator's Stripe account behind the scenes. The creator controls everything about this relationship—they can access, modify, and handle payment details however they want (because it's literally their customer).

Substack skims 10% off the top just for making API requests to Stripe and moving money from subscribers to creators' accounts.

Here's the crucial part: creators can, whenever they want, unplug their Stripe account from Substack and plug it into any other service. Say creators get sick of handing over 10% for basic payment processing—they can bounce to beehiiv (where we don't shake down our creators for revenue) and take everything with them.

But here's where Substack's recent move gets even more evil… Creators are now surrendering billing control to Apple, which becomes the actual owner of those subscriptions. Those payments, subscribers, and customer relationships? Gone from creators' Stripe accounts forever.

The critical implication is that creators who want to jump ship from Substack can't take their paying subscribers anymore, unlike before. This kind of hostile platform imprisonment is catastrophic for creators. It rips away their data and autonomy while chaining them to the platform. The creator economy has an implicit agreement about data freedom—the ability to pack up and move your essential business assets between platforms. This portability is a massive win for creators.

Look, I'd love it if every beehiiv creator stayed forever, but we've built it so they can bail whenever they want. Our users can download everything—their posts, subscriber lists, even paying customers—and take it anywhere else. This freedom drives real competition. Creators pick whoever's crushing it for them right now, and switch when something better comes along.

Substack's latest stunt is a naked attempt to kill creator independence. By handing payment control to Apple, they're making another play to trap creators permanently. As I called it a while ago, this follows the standard extortion playbook of fee-harvesting platforms:

1. Seize the customer relationship.

2. Make creators dependent on the platform.

3. Jack up fees gradually.

Patreon went from 5% to 12%, Gumroad jumped from 4% to 10%, Etsy climbed from 3.5% to 6.5%. Substack's been executing this strategy right in front of us.

A quick tangent

Hey, it's Doc again. I wanted to take a moment to tell you the real reason I think Substack users are shitting on them on a near-daily basis. There is a little thing called product development, a concept Substack has all but ignored for the better part of five years. Take a look at what beehiiv have shipped in just the last twelve months.

Two release events. A Winter one dropped digital products at 0% commission, an AI website builder, link-in-bio, dynamic content, and a rebuilt automation suite. A Summer release in July landed a community feature, an AI operator called Copilot, programmatic ads that match sponsors to audiences without a sales process, and a completely rebuilt visual editor. Somewhere in the middle, they shipped native podcast hosting (also 0%), webinars, metered paywalls, paid trials, and an MCP that wires your newsletter straight into ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini.

And that's on top of the two years before it: AI content tools, podcast voice cloning, website builder V2, audio newsletters, direct sponsorships, custom paywalls with A/B testing, gift subscriptions, verified clicks, click maps, a send API, white-labelled mobile apps, and the Typedream acquisition. And plenty more.

Substack, meanwhile, has shipped plenty too: livestreams, group chats, a video feed, a TV app. Every one of them points readers at Substack's app and Substack's feed, not the creator's business.

If you are looking for product development on steroids, just follow beehiiv’s product updates. Even if you don’t use the platform, just follow it to see how best-in-class releases go down. Now back to Tyler.

It’s beginning to look like a trend

In this next section, I am going to walk you through only a small handful of the own goals Substack has had over the last few years. If I had another 1,000 words to write in this piece, I could go on.

2022: Substack releases their app, converting your subscribers into their users. Creators lose audience control while Substack blasts automated messages, pushing app downloads. (Seize the customer relationship).

2023: Substack employs manipulative dark pattern tactics to generate subscribers and claim responsibility for creator growth. (Make creators dependent on the platform).

2025: Substack cuts creators out of the payment relationship, ensuring they can't take their business elsewhere. (Make creators dependent on the platform).

I don't have a finance degree, but if TCG expects any return on that $1.1B valuation, the next move is obvious: cranking up Substack's fees. And since creators can't export their paid subscribers (thanks to this iOS change), what choice do they have but to eat it? This isn't just exploitative. And users hate it too.

Meanwhile, creators like Oliver Darcy, who built Status on beehiiv in 2024, maintain complete brand control, own their entire audience, and pocket every dollar they generate ($1M+ ARR year one, by the way).

2026: Substack launches a TV app with an algorithmic "For You" row of recommended videos, and its own writers push back in the comments of the announcement. (Seize the customer relationship).

Future

Smart creators and sophisticated operators understand the value of controlling their own destiny rather than handing the keys to a platform with competing priorities.

Media companies have lived through this nightmare repeatedly: Facebook, Twitter, Google, and now Substack. When the platforms creators built won't protect them, we need to create something new, as a community.

Extra reading

• When David Ate Goliath: beehiiv’s Zero To One - July, 2026

• Unfiltered: beehiiv’s Build Or Die - July, 2026

• beehiiv’s 5-Year Sprint to $20M ARR - August, 2025

And that’s it! You can follow Tyler on Twitter and LinkedIn, and also don’t forget to check out beehiiv to keep up with what they’re building.

BRAIN FOOD 🧠 

TWEETS OF THE WEEK 🐣 

TOOLS WE RECOMMEND 🛠️

Every week, we highlight tools we like and those we actually use inside our business and give them an honest review. Today, we are highlighting Framer*—the site builder trusted by startups to Fortune 500.

See the full set of tools we use inside Athyna & Open Source CEO here.

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