How the decision is made

1. Required features come first

A paid newsletter purpose or positive newsletter revenue requires paid subscriptions. Products requires native digital product sales. Course requires native course hosting. Advanced means multi-step workflow tooling. Advertising / recommendations requires a built-in paid monetization route; audience discovery alone does not qualify. Basic means broadcast-first use, with no automation requirement.

Plans missing any requirement or exceeding their modeled audience limit are excluded. If no service qualifies, we show no match.

2. Select a plan and compare costs

Choose the lowest known annual cost among qualifying plans. When a qualifying plan has an unknown price, the choice remains provisional. We use the cheaper of annual billing and twelve monthly payments, with no introductory discounts.

Annual platform cost = annual subscription + 12 × monthly newsletter revenue × platform take rate + required annual add-ons.

Planning size is the larger of your current and month-12 audience. The main result is a full year at that size, not a forecast of your first year's bills. Current-size annual costs are also shown. Revenue stays constant.

We do not interpolate unknown price tiers. Kit's 0.6% platform component is separated from its combined 3.5% + $0.30 commerce charge. Payment processing, Stripe recurring billing charges, taxes, domains, migration, product/course transaction fees and advertising revenue fees are excluded. Seven inputs do not determine those amounts. Required modeled add-ons are zero; external course tools are not assumed.

3. Rank viable options

Feature fit starts at 50. Add 12 for Substack + Newsletter, beehiiv + Paid Newsletter, Kit + Products (or product selling), or GetResponse + Course. Add 8 for Kit/GetResponse when advanced automation is required.

Monetization fit: when advertising is requested, beehiiv receives 20 and other qualifying services 12. Otherwise, for positive newsletter revenue and a known platform fee, add 20 × (1 − take rate / 10%). Otherwise add zero.

Cost score = 30 × (lowest known annual cost + 100) / (this option's annual cost + 100). An unknown cost receives zero cost points and makes the overall recommendation provisional.

Total = feature fit + monetization fit + cost score. Ties use lower known cost, then service ID alphabetically. These weights are editorial MVP policy, not empirically proven quality ratings; the previous specification did not define numeric weights.

4. Show three useful answers

Best fit is the highest score. Alternative is the next distinct service. Cheapest viable option is the lowest known platform cost; it can be the same as Best fit. If any viable option has unknown costs, the cheapest claim is explicitly limited to known quotes, except that a verified zero platform cost cannot be beaten by a non-negative cost.