Cartoon by Rodrigo de Matos

Since the start of our newsletter service a couple of years ago, we’ve been using Mailchimp. We always understood the limits of the free service Mailchimp provides, and we were planning to switch to a paid account once our newsletter following got large enough to justify doing so. We believe in paying for online services. However, with the latest policy change further limiting how many subscribers we can have and how many newsletters we can send out, we have decided to switch to Substack.

The basic obstacle to continue using Mailchimp (and paying for it) is that it’s just too expensive. We run three newsletters, a daily cartoon newsletter, a monthly newsletter and a newsletter to our cartoonists informing them of new projects. Mailchimps new policy would require us to upgrade to a paid account for all three of them, and the account that we could afford would still severely limit our number of subscribers.

We do not make money with or newsletters, nor do we have a conversion rate in mind when we send them out. We merely wish to send out editorial cartoons (and news about editorial cartooning) to those people who are interested in them. We’d be happy to pay Mailchimp a fee for this, but with the amount they are asking it seems we’re not part of their (commercial) target market.

So we’re switching to Substack, which will allow us to keep sending out newsletters for free. They operate on a different business model; we get the option of asking our subscribers to pay for (certain) content. They get a commission of the revenue generated by paid subsciptions.

We do not plan to ask money for our newsletters. However, we do want keep to option open for people who want to support us and our cartoonists, on a strictly voluntary basis.

We hope those of you who have subscribed to our newsletters will not notice too much difference. And for anyone not subscribed yet, consider doing so, either to our daily newsletter or our monthly newsletter.