You say "Substack will always be dedicated to helping individuals and small teams publish across formats, build an audience, and make money from subscriptions". I continue to publish on Substack because I want the articles I write to have as much airplay as possible, but it is massively frustrating that I can never make money from any of…
You say "Substack will always be dedicated to helping individuals and small teams publish across formats, build an audience, and make money from subscriptions". I continue to publish on Substack because I want the articles I write to have as much airplay as possible, but it is massively frustrating that I can never make money from any of my Substack subscriptions because you continue to ignore the calls for an alternative payment method. Many of us don't want to or cannot use Stripe. Please finally take proper note of this and give us another payment option so that those of us who haven't earned a single cent for our contributions to this platform can finally receive some financial benefit.
Yeah, I just went through a whole annoying process with Stripe because they were threatening to shut off my ability to have paid subscribers.
Largely because of human error on my part. I asked them to fix it for me and they repeatedly refused. I had over 24 discussions with Stripe trying to get them to correct my error. But I finally managed to get it fixed after WAY too long.
At the very least there should be more than one payment processor on Substack. I was at the point of looking at finding an alternative payment processor which I didn’t want to have to do.
I gave up with Stripe. They were literally driving me nuts with endless emails that never led to a solution to the problems I had with them. I had used their system previously, but there came a point at which they wouldn't accept a single one of the numerous documents I sent them to try and make things workable again.
I simply cannot grasp why Substack doesn't enable an alternative, e.g. PayPal, which is the system I use for subscriptions and donations to my website.
Did you try using their phone conversation option? I mentioned my problem to someone on Notes and they suggested calling them. I finally did that and I seem to have gotten through to them.
Apparently the people they have on the phone have more authority than the email people or live chat people. Which seems like a terrible thing to do as a company. But I think it worked.
Thanks! I just gave up. It was just too time consuming to keep going around in ridiculous circles. I am a pretty special case (a 70-year-old freelance journalist without a permanent base and living primarily in Asia, who would be described as a 'digital nomad'!). Stripe just cannot work for me, as far as I can see. I just about manage with PayPal!
I can certainly understand that. Be careful with PayPal though. In looking for alternatives, I looked at Patreon which has PayPal too, but their verification process goes through Stripe.
Twitter as well, their verification process involves using Stripe. Pretty much all of Substack’s competitors use Stripe.
I definitely don’t think that it should be limited to one system but there are drawbacks and benefits to both.
Using one system means that as a company they are not trying to piece together multiple systems and making sure they don’t conflict. But that also means that there’s a single point of failure for the entire system. Meaning if Stripe goes down for whatever reason, the whole payment system of Substack goes down.
This is not a good idea from a strategic stand point in terms of long terms stability of the system. Though as you say, the fact that it won’t work in some countries yet they offer Substack in those countries seems counter productive.
Although many of those places have a lot of infrastructure problems that would make it difficult to set up properly. Not to mention vulnerable to attack.
You say "Substack will always be dedicated to helping individuals and small teams publish across formats, build an audience, and make money from subscriptions". I continue to publish on Substack because I want the articles I write to have as much airplay as possible, but it is massively frustrating that I can never make money from any of my Substack subscriptions because you continue to ignore the calls for an alternative payment method. Many of us don't want to or cannot use Stripe. Please finally take proper note of this and give us another payment option so that those of us who haven't earned a single cent for our contributions to this platform can finally receive some financial benefit.
Yeah, I just went through a whole annoying process with Stripe because they were threatening to shut off my ability to have paid subscribers.
Largely because of human error on my part. I asked them to fix it for me and they repeatedly refused. I had over 24 discussions with Stripe trying to get them to correct my error. But I finally managed to get it fixed after WAY too long.
At the very least there should be more than one payment processor on Substack. I was at the point of looking at finding an alternative payment processor which I didn’t want to have to do.
I gave up with Stripe. They were literally driving me nuts with endless emails that never led to a solution to the problems I had with them. I had used their system previously, but there came a point at which they wouldn't accept a single one of the numerous documents I sent them to try and make things workable again.
I simply cannot grasp why Substack doesn't enable an alternative, e.g. PayPal, which is the system I use for subscriptions and donations to my website.
Did you try using their phone conversation option? I mentioned my problem to someone on Notes and they suggested calling them. I finally did that and I seem to have gotten through to them.
Apparently the people they have on the phone have more authority than the email people or live chat people. Which seems like a terrible thing to do as a company. But I think it worked.
Thanks! I just gave up. It was just too time consuming to keep going around in ridiculous circles. I am a pretty special case (a 70-year-old freelance journalist without a permanent base and living primarily in Asia, who would be described as a 'digital nomad'!). Stripe just cannot work for me, as far as I can see. I just about manage with PayPal!
I can certainly understand that. Be careful with PayPal though. In looking for alternatives, I looked at Patreon which has PayPal too, but their verification process goes through Stripe.
Twitter as well, their verification process involves using Stripe. Pretty much all of Substack’s competitors use Stripe.
It's totally unfair for Substack to only use a system that isn't even available in some countries.
I definitely don’t think that it should be limited to one system but there are drawbacks and benefits to both.
Using one system means that as a company they are not trying to piece together multiple systems and making sure they don’t conflict. But that also means that there’s a single point of failure for the entire system. Meaning if Stripe goes down for whatever reason, the whole payment system of Substack goes down.
This is not a good idea from a strategic stand point in terms of long terms stability of the system. Though as you say, the fact that it won’t work in some countries yet they offer Substack in those countries seems counter productive.
Although many of those places have a lot of infrastructure problems that would make it difficult to set up properly. Not to mention vulnerable to attack.