I'm No Longer Monetizing Substack in 2025. Here's What I'm Doing Instead.

This platform's monetization is bad for my business and creates more problems than it solves, and that keeps me from writing.

I am a veteran and early-ish adopter of the online patronage model of approaching creative work. I’ve done a tour of duty on Patreon, BuyMeACoffee, Ghost, Medium’s Partnership Program, and, of course, here. I love a lot of things about Substack and am still excited to create on this platform in the future, and using it as a way to reach new people and get to know new folks.

But, as a marginalized creator with ADHD who lives in a state with aggressive digital sales tax policy, the one place I will NEVER cut corners or even attempt to play dirty or bend the rules is when it comes to bookkeeping and tax compliance. Several a violent criminal has been taken off the streets by the lovely people at the Internal Revenue Service and their various localized and international counterparts, and by that virtue, I do not wish to go to prison because my neurodivergence neurodiverted.

When you have monetized subscriptions on Substack (who take 10% on top of what is charged to process transactions), you are your own merchant of record, meaning *you* are responsible for tax compliance as a creator, and monitoring all of the localized and international thresholds and myriads of rules of tax compliance for your little publication. Stripe Tax is, tbh, useless and a pain in the ass to deal with, and I just don’t have it in me to deal with the administrative dimensions of getting set up for compliance as a team of one.

Gumroad recently announced that it’s becoming a Merchant of Record as of January 1st, 2025, meaning that for the same amount of my revenue that I’m currently paying Substack, I can…actually run a functional business as a creator that not only gives me peace of mind, it reduces my administrative burdens, and allows me to focus on my creativity and producing quality experiences for my patrons and clients. Further, many of their features are already very copacetic to how I prefer to operate…namely: with flexibility of pricing. There are other benefits for me, but the lack of anxiety and fear about taxes potentially being used as a weapon by my government (or others) is primary amongst them. I’d be happy to pay Substack a fee for not monetizing through them, or to monetize through them if they had a better approach to sales & VAT tax, but alas: I gotta do what’s best for me.

So, sometime in the new Gregorian year, I will be reimagining the ecosystem of how I create, about who and what gets access to that creativity, and when I know what the heck I am doing, using Gumroad to make my life easier while supporting that creativity.

But I just wanted to give folks a head’s up that the change is coming, long before it actually happens and explain my reasoning in advance.

Thank you for being with me through all of the ups and downs, such is the way of finding our sea legs.