Nobody has ever said, “I need to start a beehiiv.”

Say that sentence out loud. It doesn’t have a ring to it. Yet. Nobody says “I need to start a Kit,” either, or a Ghost.

But “I need to start a Substack”? Yeah, I’ve heard someone say that before. Ten years in, the platform’s name does the job the word “newsletter” used to do.

I run one newsletter on each side of that gap. The Sunday Back Page lives on beehiiv. Write Sports lives on Substack. I didn’t plan it that way.

beehiiv’s Summer Release breaks down into six parts, each one measured against what Substack already has: podcast hosting, Community, Copilot, a new editor, and the money tools underneath it all. Plus an inbox-fatigue read worth your time, and where I actually stand between these two platforms myself.

I started writing on Substack in April 2025 for the most unoriginal reason there is: everyone else was already there, and it cost nothing to begin. By August, I was helping other sports writers do the same thing, which meant actually learning the platform instead of coasting on it.

Beehiiv hit my radar that winter because of its pedigree. The people who built it came out of Morning Brew, the newsletter that made a newsletter sound like a real business instead of a hobby. Some of the newsletter industry experts I was growing to trust use it; many even work with the company. I filed it away and kept writing on Substack anyway.

What follows is six parts of proof, and one bigger question sitting underneath all of them: can a genuinely good product launch outrun 10 years of vernacular?

A note before Kit, Ghost, and LiveIntent keep showing up below: I use beehiiv and Substack every week. I don’t use Kit, Ghost, or LiveIntent. Where they appear here, it’s from their own documentation and other people’s reporting, not firsthand experience. I hear good things about all three. I just can’t vouch for them the way I can vouch for the two I actually run newsletters on.

Substack’s been in podcasting since February 2019 — TechCrunch covered it the day it shipped, years before beehiiv existed in its current form.

Beehiiv didn’t launch native podcast hosting until this April, confirmed on its own product blog — 0% revenue share, one-click Apple and Spotify sync.

Substack’s model is older and costs more: a 10% cut on paid podcast subscriptions, per TechCrunch’s reporting on the beehiiv launch.

Ghost got in too. It partnered with Transistor.fm for members-only podcast hosting, announced on Ghost’s own changelog in March.

Podcast hosting isn’t a beehiiv innovation. It’s the space where beehiiv is the one playing catch-up.

Beehiiv’s Community is new: channels, gated spaces, tied straight into subscriber data, per beehiiv’s Summer Release recap and Press Gazette's coverage of the launch. This is more like getting a version of membership platform Circle or community chat platform Discord.

Substack got there years earlier, using a different model. Notes launched in April 2023 as a social feed. Chat launched in November 2022 as group threads. Neither needed a subscriber list to work.

Kit doesn’t have anything like it — nothing in Kit’s own feature pages resembles a community layer, just a referral network between newsletters.

Substack’s chat function has already outgrown what it was built for. I wouldn’t be surprised if it got a lot more interesting before beehiiv’s version catches up.

Substack has AI-generated title and subtitle suggestions in the editor. It’s narrow, and I can confirm it by opening my own Substack dashboard, not by any article.

Beehiiv’s Copilot is a full agent wired into an MCP, reading subscriber data and drafting automations on request, per beehiiv’s own launch post.

The gap is real. But Copilot isn’t proof of some unique beehiiv invention: every SaaS platform is bolting some version of an AI layer onto its product this year.

One flag I can’t fully close out: Kit’s own materials describe a Kit MCP and AI subject-line tools, which complicates beehiiv calling itself first in the industry to ship one.

Beehiiv’s new editor is a real drag-and-drop, click-to-style WYSIWYG, per the Summer Release post.

Substack’s is a rich-text block editor: solid, familiar, not visual in the way beehiiv means it.

Metered paywall is a genuine first: let a reader hit a set number of premium posts before asking them to pay, per beehiiv’s launch post.

Substack’s paywall is still binary — dropped into a post by hand, or applied to an entire archive at once, per Substack’s own support documentation.

Paid trials are less of a leap. Substack already offers a flat seven-day free trial. Beehiiv just made the length and price adjustable.

Group Subscriptions is another thing beehiiv introduced that Substack already has. Substack’s had bulk, seat-based group subscriptions documented in its own support center since at least November 2023, when one creator was already selling 100-seat group plans.

Premium Podcasts is the podcast fight all over again: you keep 100% with beehiiv, 90% with Substack.

One more piece worth adding here: programmatic advertising. Beehiiv’s ad network has been manual so far — publishers browse available inventory and pick what runs — and it’s now adding programmatic capabilities on top, filling ad slots automatically with whichever advertiser pays the most for that audience. Substack rolled out its own sponsorship network on June 15, but only for its bestsellers so far, with no announced timetable for when — or if — it opens to the wider publisher base.

Take beehiiv's "we don't take a cut" line with a grain of salt. It's true, technically: beehiiv takes 0% of what your subscribers pay you. But you still pay beehiiv a flat monthly fee for the software itself (unless you’re on the modest free plan), whether that month brought in 10 paying readers or zero. Substack works the opposite way — no software fee at all, but it takes 10% of what your subscribers actually pay you. At real volume, beehiiv's flat fee wins easily. Below that volume, 10% of nothing is still nothing, and a bill is still a bill.

Substack is still the elephant in the room. Beehiiv is still punching up. You already know why — nobody says “I need to start a beehiiv.”

For a while, beehiiv's talk matched that gap in reverse. When it shipped write access for its MCP integration, its own product blog called it the project the team was proudest of, and said it would redefine what's possible on the platform — for an API integration update. Last Thursday wasn't that kind of overreach. That was beehiiv finally throwing a punch big enough to match its own hype.

Substack works the opposite way. Most weeks it ships something and says nothing about it. Then it launches a sponsorship program, and there’s a real press cycle.

That sponsorship program went live in June, and Axios reported the hire behind it as a move to help Substack better compete with beehiiv’s ad network. That’s the clearest evidence beehiiv is actually pushing Substack anywhere.

And Substack’s Chat, the group-thread feature that’s already outgrown what it was built for? Don’t be surprised if that gets a lot more interesting before beehiiv’s Community has time to catch up.

Beehiiv shipped six major features in a single day and didn’t half-ass a single one of them. Metered Paywall doesn’t exist anywhere else in this category. The visual editor is a real jump, not a tweak.

Substack just walked away from 10 years of treating advertising like something beneath it, and built an actual network with Uber and Balenciaga on the roster. That’s the hallmark of a company that still thinks it has more room to grow — and with more than 100,000 publishers already making real money there, it’s probably right.

Beehiiv is winning the feature-release news cycle. Substack is still winning the market. Neither one has to lose for the other to be worth watching. Two platforms fighting this hard over the same writers is the best thing that could happen to anyone building a newsletter right now.

One read this week that’s bigger than beehiiv or Substack:

📬 Puck’s Julia Alexander on inbox fatigue — most Americans who read newsletters subscribe to fewer than five, per Pew Research. Beehiiv versus Substack is the wrong fight. The right one is earning a spot in that five.

I’m still stuck in newsletter purgatory. Substack and beehiiv, both.

Here’s the math nobody talks about: Substack’s 10% cut only gets expensive once you have real paid subscriber volume. I’m not there yet. Below that line, beehiiv’s tiered pricing — even with the bells and whistles I like — can cost more than 10% of what I’m actually making. The flat fee I keep telling you to watch out for? I’m watching out for it myself.

I want beehiiv to be Write Sports’ home. But I’ve built this thing on Substack, and I still like it there, too, especially the many relationships I’ve built with hundreds of Substack creators. I’m a fan of both, which is an uncomfortable thing to admit right after spending a thousand words fact-checking one against the other.

So: Do I play both platforms with Write Sports the way I have with The Sunday Back Page? I don’t have the answer yet. Working through it in public. Probably a mistake. Probably also useful.

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