Fingers has moved platforms. Here's why.

I’ve fielded a few inquiries from other independent publishers about how and why I moved Fingers from Substack to Beehiiv. I’m always glad to talk this through in more detail with colleagues, so if you’re contemplating a similar move, feel free to get in touch: [email protected].

In the meantime, I thought it’d be productive to put all the stuff I’ve written about the move in one place for easy reference. This is that place.

🐝 How Fingers moved from Substack to Beehiiv

Editor’s note: The section below is adapted from an edition of Fingers originally published 12/18/24.

In mid-December 2024, I migrated Fingers from Substack to Beehiiv, with an engineer from the latter platform kindly holding my hand throughout the ~90min process. The move included most of Fingers’ four-year publishing archive and most of its ~7,000 subscribers.

As a blanket statement, if you’re a Fingers reader—free or paid—and have trouble with your subscription, don’t hesitate to email me: [email protected].

For the curious, some notes on the move:

• What this means for the Fingers Fam: Hopefully nothing! Because Substack is a layer that sits atop of my payment-processing software (Stripe), all paid subscriptions should have transferred over as-is. Free and paid subscribers can log into Fingers on the web by clicking the link in the upper-righthand corner and enter the email at which you receive the boozeletter. More info on that process here.

• What this means for me: Hopefully something! I’m looking forward to growing Fingers on the Beehiiv platform, which has more customization options and some other tools Substack was lacking. From an operational standpoint, Beehiiv is a good bit cheaper than Substack, too, so I’ll be able to capture more margin: the former will set me back around $1,000 annually, compared to around $4,000 for the latter. That’s significant savings for a small, independent, one-man-band like your fearless Fingers editor.

• Why I migrated “most,” not all, of Fingers’ archives: Like any transfer between content management systems, there was some breakage between Substack and Beehiiv. Most of this was cosmetic stuff, image galleries and so forth. The biggest genuine loss is the comments sections, which are locked into Substack’s platform. It was a tough call to leave those behind, but I believe it’s the right one for Fingers’ future. That said, thank you to everybody who made the comments sections so vibrant on the old platform; hope you’ll do likewise here!

• Why I migrated “most,” not all, of Fingers’ subscribers: We ported over all of the roughly 600 paid subscribers to the new platform, for the obvious reason that they fund my work and I would very much like to keep working. Pretty simple. Less simple was figuring out which of the ~6,500 free sign-ups were actually real, and which were defunct addresses, spambots, etc. Ultimately, we identified more than 2,000 addresses that had a) never paid Fingers a cent; b) landed on Fingers’ list via Substack’s recommendation engine; and c) hadn’t opened an email in the last six months. This more or less confirmed the suspicions I wrote about back in June about the quality of sign-ups Substack was sending my way. No wonder my open rates had been tanking.

Fingers isn’t a newsletter about newsletters (god forbid), so I’ll leave the operational review at that. Other publishers, feel free to reach out if you’re contemplating a similar move and want more details: [email protected].

👋 Why Fingers moved from Substack to Beehiiv

Editor’s note: The section below is adapted from an edition of Fingers originally published 6/12/24.

In late April 2024, Substack something in its recommendation engine that either bamboozled a bunch of fundamentally disinterested free readers into signing up for the boozeletter, and/or made it easier for spambots to do so. The big uptick starting at 4/24/24 represents overall list growth of around 1,000 new sign-ups through the end of June 2024. The vast majority of those sign-ups never opened an email or interacted with Fingers’ website; based on a manual review, around 200 of them were obvious bot addresses.

The net effect is that Fingers’ list got weighed down with a lot of dead weight all at once, and that measurably tanked performance. Here are the average open rates for trailing periods through June 2024:

• Average open rate for the trailing 24 months: 46%

• Average OR T12: 45%

• Average OR T3: 39%

• Average OR T1: 36%

That the overall open rate would decline as the overall list size grows isn’t unusual, but it only began slipping like this in April 2024, after literal years of floating between 46-50% or so regardless of list growth.

This was just one of my frustrations with Substack. There were others. Too Online™️ Friends of Fingers may have caught the truly embarrassing and dismal scandal at the end of 2023 when Substack’s executives advanced a specious “free speech” argument to defend their policies of monetizing neo-Nazi publications and actively promoting white supremacists, anti-vaxxers, transphobes, and other charlatans.

(I’m not going to get further into the weeds on this; it sucked and sucks. Ryan Broderick’s explanation of why he moved Garbage Day from Substack to Beehiiv is a good primer, if you’re interested.)

There’s also just the fact that Substack is far more costly than the competition. Substack takes a 10% cut of publications’ gross revenue, whereas Beehiiv charges a flat annual fee that represents a mere fraction of that sum for Fingers. It’s a huge difference for a niche newsletter business.

I wanted to leave Substack prior to the Nazi stuff. I didn’t like its right-wing venture-capital backers, or the “marketplace-of-ideas” fig leaf its leaders hide behind instead of even pretending to attempt content moderation at a platform level, or the fact that it costs so much. Its tools are very good, and I grew accustomed to using them over four years, but they’re not that good. It got to the point where I didn’t trust Fingers’ future on Substack, so I moved.

As ever, other publishers should feel free to reach out for more info: [email protected].