Is day3 cheaper than Substack?

Not for a free newsletter. Substack costs nothing to send, and day3 charges a monthly plan by volume. day3 comes out ahead once you are selling something other than the newsletter, because Substack's share of a paid publication grows with your revenue while a send-based plan does not.

Can I move my Substack list to day3?

The email addresses, yes, by CSV export and import. Paid subscriptions cannot move, because day3 has no payments layer. People who pay you on Substack keep paying you on Substack until you move that billing yourself.

Does day3 give me a public archive?

No. There are no public post URLs, no comments and no reader-facing site. day3 sends email and reports on it. If you need a web archive people can find and link, a publishing platform is the right shape of tool.

Who owns the subscriber list?

You do, on both. Substack lets you export and has always been clear about that. The difference is the sending domain and the reader relationship: on day3 the mail comes from your domain, so the reputation and the relationship are yours from the first send.

All comparisons

day3 vs. Substack

A Substack alternative where the list is yours.

Substack is a publishing platform with a network attached, and it earns by taking a share of what your paid subscribers pay you.

	day3	Substack
Pricing model	By emails sent each month	Free to send; a share of paid subscription revenue
Subscriber limits	Unlimited on every plan	Unlimited too
Product scope	Product updates and transactional email, on purpose narrow	Publishing platform: archive, network, comments, payments
Sending domain	Your own, authenticated with DKIM, SPF and DMARC	Substack's infrastructure
Best for	Software teams emailing their own users	Writers building a paid publication
Starting price	$1/mo for 1,000 emails	Nothing until you charge readers

Comparison reflects each product's pricing model and scope, not specific prices, because those change, so always check the latest on Substack's own site.

The core difference

day3 is not a publisher. There is no public archive, no discovery feed, no recommendations and no payments layer. You get a sending domain, a list you own outright and a flat monthly plan, which is the right trade when the email is about your product rather than a publication you sell.

The same numbers, both ways

10,000 users on the list, emailed once a week with product news. Nobody pays to receive it.

On day3

$14/mo

40,000 sends a month fits the 50,000-email plan. 10,000 subscribers costs nothing, on this plan or any other.

On Substack

Depends

Substack charges nothing to send a free newsletter and takes its cut from paid subscriptions instead, so at this shape it costs nothing and day3 costs the plan price. We don't print their price here, because it changes and a stale figure would be worse than none. Check it on their own site and run these numbers through it.

Why teams move to day3

No revenue share

A flat monthly plan by sends. What your product earns is none of our business.

Your domain, your reputation

Mail goes out authenticated from a domain you own, so the sending reputation you build belongs to you and follows you anywhere.

Built for product email

Audiences, segments, signup forms and transactional sends from the same place, which a publishing tool has no reason to offer.

When Substack is the better choice

Stay on Substack if you are building a publication rather than a product. It costs nothing until you charge, it handles payments, it gives you an archive people can link to, and its network genuinely sends readers your way. day3 does none of that on purpose. If your newsletter is the thing you sell, Substack is the better tool and this page is not trying to talk you out of it.

Moving your list across

Five steps, in this order. The first one is the one people skip.

1

Bring your suppression list first

Push the addresses that bounced, complained, or asked never to be mailed again before you import a single contact. Do it in this order and day3 refuses those rows on the way in, which is the guard working rather than an error. Do it after and you have a window where a re-import can mail someone who already left.

2

Import the contacts

Export your subscribers from Substack's settings as a CSV and upload it. day3 dedupes on the way in, refuses anyone already on your suppression list, and lets you retry only the rows that failed. Paid subscribers export as email addresses like everyone else; the billing relationship stays behind.

3

Carry the opt-outs across as opt-outs

Contacts already marked unsubscribed import with that status and the date they left on, so your new tool honours a decision made in your old one. Nobody gets re-subscribed by a migration.

4

Verify the sending domain

Connect Cloudflare and day3 publishes DKIM, SPF and DMARC for you, then rechecks until the domain verifies. On another DNS host you get the records to paste. Authenticating the domain you already send from is what keeps your reputation intact through the move.

5

Send one real campaign to yourself

A test send goes to addresses you name, through the same pipeline and the same tracking as the real thing. Compare it against your old tool's output before you point the whole list at it.

What doesn't come across

Almost everything that makes Substack a publication stays on Substack: the public archive and its URLs, comments, the recommendation network, your paid subscriptions and the Stripe relationship behind them. day3 has no payments and no way to charge a reader, so a paid publication cannot move here without moving its billing somewhere else first.

Questions

Is day3 cheaper than Substack?: Not for a free newsletter. Substack costs nothing to send, and day3 charges a monthly plan by volume. day3 comes out ahead once you are selling something other than the newsletter, because Substack's share of a paid publication grows with your revenue while a send-based plan does not.
Can I move my Substack list to day3?: The email addresses, yes, by CSV export and import. Paid subscriptions cannot move, because day3 has no payments layer. People who pay you on Substack keep paying you on Substack until you move that billing yourself.
Does day3 give me a public archive?: No. There are no public post URLs, no comments and no reader-facing site. day3 sends email and reports on it. If you need a web archive people can find and link, a publishing platform is the right shape of tool.
Who owns the subscriber list?: You do, on both. Substack lets you export and has always been clear about that. The difference is the sending domain and the reader relationship: on day3 the mail comes from your domain, so the reputation and the relationship are yours from the first send.