Charge for your newsletter on your own site

Partially. You can export your email list from any major newsletter platform and import it into your own list, but paid subscribers will need to re-enter payment info because Stripe customer records can’t be transferred between accounts. The standard migration path: export your subscribers, send them a heads-up email explaining the move and the new signup link, and grant Access Passes to active paid subscribers so they don’t lose access while they update their payment info.

You trade discovery for control. Substack and beehiiv have built-in recommendation networks that can drive new subscribers, plus polished defaults for newsletter formatting. Members Only gives you a fully owned platform: your brand, your subscriber list, your URLs, and no platform cut on revenue (only Stripe’s processing fees, typically 2.9% + 30¢). It’s the right choice when you already have an audience or a growth channel and want to keep more of what you earn — not when you’re starting from zero and need a platform to find readers for you.

Members Only handles the paywall and subscriber management; for sending emails, it integrates with Mailchimp. New subscribers get added to your Mailchimp list automatically with tags you specify, and you write and send newsletters from Mailchimp as usual. If you prefer a different email tool, the same flow works through Zapier or any tool that listens for new WordPress users.

Sort of. Members Only is intentionally one paid tier — you’re a paying subscriber or you’re not. Free readers can still see free posts (just don’t mark those as restricted). For more nuanced tiering — multiple paid levels, founding-member pricing, comp’d access for specific people — you can use Access Passes to grant access manually outside the standard subscription flow. If you genuinely need three or more paid tiers with different content per tier, a more complex membership platform is a better fit.

This is the real trade-off. On Substack, the recommendations network and the “discover” feed can drive meaningful new signups. On your own site, growth comes from sources you build: SEO (your posts can rank for the topics you cover), social media, partnerships and cross-posts with other newsletters, your existing audience from other channels, and good old word of mouth. Most writers who move off platforms move *because* they already have one or more of these channels working — if you don’t yet, growing organically takes longer.