When first starting A Media Operator on Substack, the supposed “best practices” was to offer a monthly rate of $10 and an annual of $100—and their required minimum was half that. And so, I did what every other creator launching a newsletter in 2019 did and priced at $10/$100. I quickly increased the price to $20/$200, but kept going with that monthly/annual offer.
But I noticed something that should be pretty obvious… the monthly subscribers were churning at a much higher rate than the annual ones. Now there can be any number of reasons for this, including some people like the optionality of paying monthly, they’re simply testing it out, or they don’t want to feel trapped. Ultimately, the reason monthly subscribers churned more is because they had more opportunity to churn.
