Why I'm Killing My Substack Paid Tier After My "Best Year Ever"

A couple weeks ago I posted about having my “best year ever” on Substack—whatever the fuck that means. I had doubts even then.

I Had My Best Year Ever on Substack. I Don’t Think It Counts.

Meant to follow up with what those doubts actually were. Then I forgot.

So here’s that post.

This is the part where I tell you what the numbers don’t.

The Reality Check Nobody Posts on LinkedIn

Yes, I had paying subscribers. Yes, people converted after I wrote “303 Days.” That felt huge. That felt like something was clicking.

Here’s the part the metrics won’t show you:

More than 80% of my paying subscribers are people I know in real life.

They’re not paying because I offer some exclusive insights or a premium feature set. They’re paying because they know me. Because they met me at a gay blogger meetup 15 years ago. Or through a Miami web dev event. Or from that time I helped them figure out a weird JavaScript bug in 2013. Or because they’ve been watching me flail through unemployment and caregiving hell and decided to throw some money at the problem.

Which is beautiful.

Which is humbling.

Which is also not a business model.

I’m not scaling. I’m not attracting strangers who stumble on my writing and think, “Yes, I will pay this random Asian guy on the internet $5/month.” I’m not building some community of superfans. I’m getting pity subscriptions from people who’ve known me for years. (Hi Chris. Hi Grace. Thanksgiving 2017 lives on.)

It’s not sustainable. The $150/month I was making—give or take churn—doesn’t justify the mental overhead of running a paid tier. Subscribers are growing on the Substack platform, but almost no conversions. It doesn’t fund the time it takes to write. And more importantly, it doesn’t feel good anymore.

The Scoreboard Lied

When I turned on paid subscriptions in November 2024, something shifted. Suddenly, writing didn’t feel like therapeutic journaling with an audience—it had stakes. It had a scoreboard.

And I chased that scoreboard hard.

Every post was a chance to see if I could move the number. Every $5 bump meant someone believed. Every churn made me wonder if maybe I wasn’t worth it. I kept writing, kept publishing, even when I wanted to melt into the couch like a sad puddle, because the game was on.

But here’s what I’ve realized after interviewing people who paid for memberships: the scoreboard was lying to me.

It told me I was building something sustainable when I was really exhausting my personal network’s goodwill while documenting a slow-motion breakdown in real time.

I Wanted It to Work

I know this is where I’m supposed to pivot into a graceful “and that’s okay.”

But can I be honest?

I wanted this to work.

I wanted the subscriptions to mean something.

I wanted the scoreboard to say: you’re not crazy for trying to make a living by being yourself on the internet.

Because I’ve been doing this—whatever “this” is—for over 25 years. Writing. Making things. Saying things out loud that other people are afraid to say.

It’s not just second nature—it’s muscle memory. It’s how I’ve survived.

So yeah, I was hoping that maybe the thing that’s already given me connection, catharsis, community—maybe it could give me a little money, too. Not all of it. Just enough to believe I wasn’t shouting into the void.

Especially when the job search happens, all over again, in two weeks.

So What Now?

I think it means the death of the paid tier.

Not because I don’t care. But because I do—and I’m tired of pretending this is something it’s not. I’m tired of hiding posts behind a paywall no one’s reading. Tired of maintaining a subscriber-only layer that’s mostly symbolic.

So soon, everything will be public again. Old posts, new ones. All of it. Yes, it’s annoying to re-import two decades of archives into a platform that’s deeply not built for that, but turns out very few people were buying a membership to read my old blog anyway.

And no, I don’t know what this means for the “business model.” Or what I’ll do with subscriptions. Maybe I’ll figure something out. Maybe I won’t.

But here’s what I haven’t let go of:

I still want to believe that the thing I’ve done for 25 years—the thing that’s helped people, that I can do like breathing—could also help me live.

Not just emotionally. Not just creatively.

Literally.

That maybe this weird, honest, inconsistent, too-much version of me is worth something.

Maybe not to everyone. But maybe to someone.

Maybe to you.

So yeah. Everything’s going public. The rabbit hole is open. If you want to fall into it and learn way too much about me, be my guest. If you want to throw a dollar into the chaos fund, thank you. If you are dissatisfied with your recent membership purchase and would like a refund, email me. No harm, no foul.

But at least now we’re being honest with each other.

And maybe that’s something to build on.