Leave Substack Without Losing Your List

This lesson builds on the free How to Leave Substack guide — same move, walked slower, with the print-and-go checklist below and a few things the free version leaves out. Read the guide first if you haven’t; start here if you have and you’re ready to actually pack the boxes.

People act like leaving Substack is a divorce. It’s moving out of an apartment you never owned. You pack your stuff, you change your address, you hand the keys back. The only thing that can go wrong is forgetting a box.

The box you can’t forget is your list. Your subscribers are the whole business. The design, the archive, the little heart button, all of it is rented furniture you leave behind without a second thought. The list is the one asset Substack lets you carry out the door, and the one most people fumble on the way out, because they panic and overthink a move that’s mostly hauling boxes down a hallway.

Behind this header is the exact order I’d run to get a normal person off Substack without dropping a single name: what exports clean and what doesn’t, the one file you download twice because it’s cash, where email lives after, how the archive comes home with its slugs intact, the goodbye-and-hello that turns a name in a spreadsheet back into a reader, and the paid catch nobody warns you about until it’s already bled supporters out of your account.