The Slow Exit From Substack

Substack has a Nazi problem. It had one in 2023 when the Atlantic first reported it, it had one when 250 publishers wrote an open letter asking the company to stop platforming and monetizing them, and it has one this week, when the Guardian showed exactly how the money works: a $80/year Holocaust-denial newsletter, a 10% cut for Substack, and a recommendation algorithm that happily hands you 21 more accounts just like it.

Every time this surfaces, the same conversation happens. Someone says they're leaving. Someone else says they want to but can't. Not because they disagree — because leaving is a cliff edge. You point your audience at a new checkout page, and however sympathetic they are, some percentage of them react to "the payment method changed" by disputing the charge instead of just re-subscribing. Chargebacks aren't free for the person receiving them, and enough of them in a short window can get a payment processor asking questions about your account, not the reader's.

That fear is legitimate, and it's also solvable without staying put. In a Bluesky thread this week, someone put it better than most: don't jump, mirror. Keep the Substack exactly as it is — don't touch the checkout page, don't touch existing subscribers — and simultaneously publish the same free posts to a second home. Let readers find it at their own pace. Convert when they're ready. Keep the original around for as long as you need the safety net, then don't.

We went looking for the tool that does this, because it seemed like it should already exist. It mostly doesn't. Ghost ships an official Substack importer, but it's one-shot — point it at a zip export, get a one-time dump, no ongoing sync. There's a WordPress plugin that mirrors Substack via RSS, and it's honest about what it is: the README says "NO SUPPORT IS PROVIDED FOR THIS PLUGIN. USE AT YOUR OWN RISK," and it has three commits. You can wire Zapier's RSS trigger to a Ghost action, but it's notorious for mangling anything past plain text — headings, embeds, footnotes, gone.

Nobody's built this for Ghost. So we're going to.

The shape of it is simple, because it has to be: Substack has no write API in either direction, only a public RSS feed per publication. So the tool only ever runs one way — pull your Substack's free posts out via RSS, push them into a Ghost site via the Admin API, on a schedule. Paywalled posts stay exactly where they are, on Substack, untouched — you're not routing around your existing paying subscribers, you're just opening a second door for the readers who haven't found you yet.

Free, open source, no fee stacked on top of the fees you're already tired of paying. If you want early access when it's working, reply here or watch this space.

And if the day comes that you're ready to make the second home the only home — that's what we build themes for. Fold exists because the moment someone decides to pay for your writing deserves better than an afterthought.