Here’s the honest answer. If you want to send a newsletter, and especially if you want readers to pay for it, use Substack. Selfish doesn’t send email and has no payment features. If what you want is a website, meaning a blog on your own domain made of plain files on hosting you control, Selfish is the better fit. Substack is a newsletter business in a box that also puts your posts on the web. Selfish is a publishing tool that puts your posts on the web and stops there. They overlap less than the “Substack alternative” framing suggests.
At a glance
| Selfish | Substack | |
|---|---|---|
| Ownership | You own the files and choose the host | Substack hosts your publication. You can export your posts and list |
| Cost | £3.99 once for the app, introductory — £9.99 from December. Optional premium themes at £1.99 each. You pay for your own hosting | Free to publish. If you charge, 10% of each transaction plus Stripe fees, at the time of writing |
| Where content lives | On your device (optional iCloud sync), published to your server | On Substack’s servers |
| Custom domain | Whatever domain you point at your own hosting | One-time $50 fee at the time of writing. Must be a subdomain such as www |
| Email/newsletter | None. Selfish doesn’t send email. It publishes RSS and JSON feeds | Core feature. Every post can go out as an email |
| Monetisation | None built in | Paid subscriptions through Stripe |
| Audience/discovery | None built in | Substack network, Recommendations, the Substack app, Notes |
| Editing | Native app for iPhone, iPad and Mac, with live preview | Web editor and mobile apps |
| Output | A complete static site: HTML, sitemap, RSS and JSON feeds | Pages and emails on Substack’s platform |
| Lock-in/export | The published site is standard HTML with no Selfish code in it | Export includes posts, subscriber list and stats. Newsletters are sent from a substack.com address |
Where Substack genuinely wins
Email is the product
The biggest difference comes first. Selfish does not send email newsletters. It has no subscriber list, no mailing and no inbox delivery. Substack is built around exactly those things. You write a post and it lands in your subscribers’ inboxes as well as on the web. For a lot of writers, email is the only channel that reliably reaches people, so this matters.
A Selfish site does publish an RSS feed, and some email services can turn a feed into a newsletter automatically. But then you’re running two tools and managing a list yourself. Substack handles all of it for you.
Payments are built in
Substack lets you switch on paid subscriptions and connect Stripe, and readers can then pay monthly or annually. You don’t have to build anything. Selfish has no payment or subscription features of any kind.
Here’s what that convenience costs, taken from Substack’s help centre at the time of writing:
- Substack: 10% of each transaction.
- Stripe, cards: 2.9% + $0.30 per transaction.
- Stripe Billing: 0.7% on recurring payments.
On a $10 monthly subscription that works out as roughly $1.00 to Substack, about $0.59 in card fees and $0.07 in billing fees. You keep a little over $8.30. Stripe’s fees vary by country and payment method, so check your own Stripe dashboard for the real figures. Publishing itself is free however many subscribers you have. Apart from the optional custom domain fee, Substack only earns when you do.
The network
This is Substack’s quiet advantage. Its Recommendations feature lets writers suggest each other’s publications. New subscribers are shown those suggestions right after they sign up, and Substack’s dashboard shows how many subscriptions each recommendation brought in. Add the Substack reader apps, Notes and the network’s search and leaderboards, and a new publication has ways to be found that a standalone site simply doesn’t. A Selfish site has no built-in audience or discovery.
Community features
Substack has threaded comments, subscriber chat, direct messages, podcast hosting and video. Selfish has none of these, and no comments either. If you want conversation to happen where you publish, Substack gives you that from the start.
Where Selfish wins
It’s a website first
A Substack publication is a newsletter with a web archive. A Selfish site is a website. You get posts and standalone pages, categories and tags with their own archive pages, and a choice of themes. Each theme is a single self-contained CSS file with automatic dark mode. The output is a complete static site with a sitemap, feeds and canonical links. That shape suits a blog, a portfolio or a project site better than an inbox-first product does.
Your domain, your root
Substack’s custom domains cost a one-time fee, and they must use a subdomain such as www. You can redirect the root domain, but the publication lives on the subdomain. Substack also sends your emails from a substack.com address, whatever domain you use. With Selfish there’s no platform in the way. Your domain points at your hosting, and your site sits at whatever address you configure.
No platform code on the page
A Selfish site carries no Selfish code, no tracking and no analytics, and its themes phone nothing home. Readers get HTML and CSS. On Substack the page belongs to Substack’s platform and comes wrapped in Substack’s own interface. That’s reasonable for them, but it isn’t your page.
Nobody else’s terms
Your drafts live on your device, optionally synced through your own iCloud account. Selfish has no account and no servers holding your writing. The published site sits on hosting you pay for. No change of platform policy, pricing or ownership can take it down.
Exporting from Substack
Substack is better about exports than its reputation suggests. In your publication’s Settings, open Exports and choose Create new export. Substack builds a .zip with your posts, subscriber list and related statistics, and emails you when it’s ready. You can also export just the subscriber list as a CSV from the Subscribers page.
The subscriber list is the valuable part. Keep a recent copy even if you never plan to leave. Just remember that Selfish doesn’t import Substack exports, and it can’t do anything with an email list, because it doesn’t send email.
The combination some writers use
Plenty of writers don’t choose. They keep a newsletter on Substack or another email service for the inbox, and run their own site for the permanent, linkable, searchable version of their work. The website is the canonical home and the newsletter is how it’s delivered. If email matters to you and so does ownership, that split is often more sensible than forcing one tool to do both jobs. We cover the wider options in Substack alternatives that you actually own.
Choose Substack if…
- Email is how you want to reach readers.
- You want paid subscriptions without building payments, and 10% plus Stripe fees is a price you’re happy with.
- You want to be discovered through Recommendations and Substack’s app and network.
- You want comments, chat, podcasts or video in the same place.
Choose Selfish if…
- You want a website on your own domain and hosting, not a newsletter with an archive.
- You don’t need to send email, or you’re happy to handle email separately.
- You want clean static HTML with no tracking, no platform prompts and no account.
- You write on an iPhone, iPad or Mac and want to publish straight to SFTP, S3-compatible storage, Netlify, Cloudflare Pages or GitHub Pages.
Where Selfish fits
Selfish is on the App Store as one app for iPhone, iPad and Mac, for a one-time £3.99 introductory price that rises to £9.99 in December. It won’t replace a newsletter platform, and it isn’t trying to. If you want a quiet, durable website that’s entirely yours, the user guide shows how it works and the themes page shows what your site could look like.