"Substack vs Beehiiv" gets debated like the platform choice is the primary decision determining a newsletter's income. The platform choice affects fee structure and feature set at the margins, but the actual determinant of newsletter income is the free-to-paid subscriber conversion rate — and that conversion rate depends on audience trust built over months of consistent, valuable writing, a bottleneck that exists identically on either platform. That reframing matters because a lot of "which platform earns more" content implies the choice itself moves the needle on income, when the bigger variable by far is how many free subscribers convert to paid, which has far more to do with the writing and the audience relationship than with a percentage-point difference in platform fees. A Bitok Arena entry sidesteps that conversion bottleneck completely, since a result never depended on a subscriber funnel to begin with. The fee structures themselves are simple enough to state plainly: Substack takes a percentage of subscription revenue plus standard payment processing, while Beehiiv is generally structured around a flat platform subscription with no revenue share on its core plans. At low subscriber counts the difference between the two models is close to negligible in dollar terms; it only starts to compound into something noticeable once monthly revenue reaches a meaningful figure, and even then it's a smaller swing than a single percentage point of conversion rate moving up or down.
Substack takes a cut. Beehiiv takes a different cut. Neither cut matters much if the newsletter can't convert readers into paying subscribers in the first place.
None of this means the platform choice is irrelevant — fee structures, built-in monetization tools, and audience-growth features meaningfully differ and can matter at scale. It does mean the frequently asked "which platform earns more" question has a smaller answer than it's often given, because the conversion bottleneck sits upstream of the platform entirely.
The Bottleneck Both Platforms Share
Comparing Substack and Beehiiv on fee structure alone misses the shared constraint underneath both. Converting a free subscriber into a paying one requires sustained, demonstrated value over time, a process identical in shape regardless of which platform hosts the newsletter.
What determines newsletter income more than the platform choice between Substack and Beehiiv:
Free-to-paid conversion rate — the percentage of free subscribers who upgrade, driven by content value and trust, not platform fees.
Audience trust built over time — paid conversion typically requires months of consistent, demonstrated value before subscribers commit financially.
Content consistency — publishing cadence and quality affect retention and conversion far more than a percentage-point fee difference.
All three of these operate identically whether the newsletter runs on Substack, Beehiiv, or any comparable platform.
That shared bottleneck is why two newsletters with similar audience sizes on different platforms can have wildly different income, while two newsletters on the same platform with different conversion rates can have income gaps far larger than any platform fee difference could explain. Most newsletters that eventually earn meaningful paid revenue follow a similar early shape regardless of platform: a slow first few months of list-building with few or no paid subscribers, followed by a gradual uptick once the archive is deep enough to demonstrate consistent value. Newsletters that move straight to a hard paywall before that trust exists tend to convert worse than ones that prove the value publicly first — a pattern that shows up on both platforms because it has nothing to do with either one's tooling. None of that conversion-rate dependency applies to a Bitok Arena entry, on either platform's newsletter model. There's no free-to-paid funnel to build, no months of trust-building required before a result is possible — a single transaction is the entire mechanism, independent of any audience at all.