How to set your subscription price

Almost every creator sets their subscription price once, during onboarding, in about four seconds. It deserves more than that. It is the number that decides your income for the next year.

Start from what you deliver, not from what others charge

Copying the price of a creator you admire is tempting and usually wrong. Their number reflects their posting frequency, their audience size and how long they have been at it. Yours should reflect yours.

Ask instead: how many posts will a subscriber get in a month, and how much of that is exclusive? A creator posting twice a week with subscriber-only content is selling something quite different from one posting daily to everyone.

The floor is higher than you think

A common mistake is pricing at the very bottom to remove any hesitation. It rarely works the way people expect:

• Supporters who will not pay $9.99 usually will not pay $4.99 either. Price is not what is stopping them.
• A low price sets an expectation of high volume. You will feel that pressure every week.
• Raising a price later is harder than starting a little higher.

A workable starting point

If you have no data yet, start at $9.99 and adjust after two months. It sits comfortably in what supporters expect to pay and leaves you room to move in either direction.

When to change it

Change your price when something real changes: you post more, you add a format like livestreams, or your subscriber count grows past the point where you are personally replying to everyone.

Do not change it because of one quiet week. Subscription income is lumpy by nature, and reacting to noise makes it worse.

Existing subscribers keep their price

Worth knowing before you experiment: raising your price only affects new subscribers. The people who backed you early keep the rate they signed up at. That means the downside of trying a higher number is small, and it is a nice thing to be able to tell your longest-standing supporters.