Substack’s Growing Pains: Why Top Publishers Are Quietly Walking Away

In late April 2026, one of Substack’s biggest success stories quietly packed its bags. The Ankler, the influential Hollywood trade newsletter run by veteran editor Janice Min and columnist Richard Rushfield, announced it was leaving the platform. Its new home? Passport, a subscription-management platform developed by tech journalist Ben Thompson in partnership with Automattic (the company behind WordPress).

Substack’s Growing Pains: Why Top Publishers Are Quietly Walking Away The move wasn’t framed as a dramatic breakup. Min called Substack an “incredible launchpad.”

But she was blunt about the limits: “As we grew into a broader media business, we needed more flexibility and control across products, revenue, and audience relationships than the platform allows.”

Translation: The economics and infrastructure that once felt like a generous safety net had started to feel like a leash.

The Commission Problem

Substack charges a flat 10% cut of subscription revenue. For a solo writer earning a few thousand dollars a month, that’s a reasonable trade-off for hosting, payments, discovery tools, and the platform’s powerful recommendation engine.

Substack’s Growing Pains: Why Top Publishers Are Quietly Walking Away But when a publication scales into a real media company generating millions annually, 10% stops looking like a service fee and starts looking like a very expensive tax.

For outlets like The Ankler, Bulwark, Zeteo, or Feed Me — some of Substack’s top revenue drivers in business and politics — that cut now runs into the high six figures, if not seven. At a certain point, publishers start asking the obvious question: Why are we still paying this?

Built for Solo Creators, Not Media Companies

Substack was designed for the “one-man band” era of independent publishing. Its standardized templates, centralized dashboard, and all-in-one approach made it frictionless for individuals. But success has a way of exposing the cracks.

Substack’s Growing Pains: Why Top Publishers Are Quietly Walking Away As newsletters mature, they stop being simple email products. They become full businesses: paid podcasts, live events, premium archives, custom paywalls, branded sponsorships, and sophisticated analytics funnels.

Substack’s rigid ecosystem struggles to accommodate any of that without feeling clunky or restrictive. Publishers describe hitting what insiders now call “the Substack ceiling”—a point where the platform’s one-size-fits-all model actively holds them back.

At the same time, Substack has leaned harder into its social features. Notes, internal recommendations, discovery feeds, and algorithmic promotion keep readers inside the app. That’s great for Substack’s network effects — it claims to drive roughly 30% of new paid subscriptions across the platform. But for publishers, it creates a subtle problem: readers increasingly experience the content as part of Substack rather than as an independent media brand. Some publishers feel they’re no longer building their own audience — they’re building equity for the platform.

The Quiet Exodus

Substack’s Growing Pains: Why Top Publishers Are Quietly Walking Away The Ankler’s departure isn’t being treated as an isolated case. According to reporting in The Wrap and Status newsletter, several other major Substack publishers have privately expressed frustration and begun exploring exits. Names like The Bulwark, Zeteo, and Feed Me keep surfacing in conversations about who might leave next.

These aren’t small indie operations. They are some of the platform’s most visible and financially successful titles. Their potential departure would be more than symbolic—it would signal that Substack is losing the very creators who proved its model could work at scale.

Competitors Are Ready

The alternatives are already positioning themselves aggressively:

Passport (where The Ankler just landed) offers the kind of clean, flexible infrastructure Thompson built for his own Stratechery newsletter.
Beehiiv has made its zero-commission model a direct selling point and is courting Substack refugees with stronger analytics and ad tools. Its CEO has even traded public barbs with Substack co-founder Hamish McKenzie.
Ghost appeals to publishers who want full ownership, open-source flexibility, and no revenue share at all.
Even Patreon and traditional self-hosted solutions are seeing renewed interest from creators tired of platform risk.

The pitch is straightforward: lower (or zero) fees, full data ownership, custom design, and the ability to build direct relationships without feeding a centralized social layer.

What This Means for Substack

Substack remains an extraordinary tool for new writers. Its discovery engine, easy onboarding, and built-in payments are still unmatched for creators starting from zero. The platform’s network effects can still launch careers.

But for publishers who have already used Substack to reach escape velocity, the value proposition is inverting. The same features that once accelerated growth — centralized discovery, standardized product, 10% cut—now feel like they’re extracting more value than they provide.

The Ankler’s move, and the quiet conversations happening behind the scenes at other top publications, suggest we’re entering a new phase. Substack proved that independent media could thrive at scale. Now the most successful players are realizing they don’t need the training wheels anymore—and they certainly don’t want to keep paying for them.

Watch for the next big announcement. Beehiiv, Ghost, or Passport could soon be touting their own high-profile Substack defection. When that happens, it won’t be an anomaly. It will be confirmation that the platform that once democratized publishing is now watching some of its biggest stars walk out the door.