Substack is a popular platform for writers to monetize their posts. With Substack, you can easily set up a page (eg. writer.substack.com), get subscribers and then monetize your posts through a paid subscription. Everything is handled by Substack.

We recreate Substack's functionality using Webflow, Memberstack, Zapier and Mailierlite.

The advantage of building it ourselves is that we keep control of the look and feel of the experience (every Substack page is almost identical). It also costs cheaper than Substack at a certain subscriber count (Substack charges 10% of revenue).

The disadvantages of building it ourselves is that our clone requires copy pasting the posts from Webflow to Mailerlite. Our registration process isn't as clean as Substack's.

In this section, we set up our Webflow CMS. Webflow CMS will be where we put our blog posts. First, we create a page /all-posts/ where we list show all of our blog posts. We use conditional visibility to hide paid posts (if post = paid, show a pay gate).

Then we create /all-posts-paid/ which shows all of our posts whether or not they are paid. This will be the page we hide with Memberstack for non paying members/subscribers.

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In this section, we set up our Webflow CMS. Webflow CMS will be where we put our blog posts. First, we create a page /all-posts/ where we list show all of our blog posts. We use conditional visibility to hide paid posts (if post = paid, show a pay gate).

Then we create /all-posts-paid/ which shows all of our posts whether or not they are paid. This will be the page we hide with Memberstack for non paying members/subscribers.