Substack has Failed Indian Creators

A rant

Update: Since the publication of this post Substack has fixed one of the main issues which was causing all international payments to fail, leading to loss of existing subscribers as their renewals failed silently. However, two issues still remain:

• We cannot set our prices higher than INR 5000/- because Indian regulations require an additional confirmation from the customer for such amounts and I don’t think that works very reliably on Substack. I’ve learned this the hard way and had to reduce my annual plan from 6k to 5k.

• Substack still doesn’t enable localized pricing for Indians. This has the implication that all the international readers will see the pricing in Indian rupees. Usually they don’t recognize the currency symbol and have no idea about the conversion rate and they will quickly drop the idea of paying. It also has secondary effects. Few people who do try to pay, they may end up getting their cards blocked because the banks suspect it’s a fraud transaction, or they just decline the payment.

• And now Stripe has stopped accepting Indian businesses as customers, so new writers cannot enable monetization anymore. Substack needs to integrate with more payment processors if they wish to capture the Indian market before someone else takes it away. I see more and more Indians taking up online writing and this is very heartbreaking.

Dear subscribers,

This is not my usual deep technical post. It’s going to be a critical examination of the challenges and frustrations that I (and many other Indian writers) face in monetizing our work on Substack. Despite years of dedication, countless articles, and attracting thousands of readers, Substack's platform has failed to support us adequately, leaving our potential income in jeopardy.

As I write this, I’m on the verge of losing all my monthly paid subscribers. Here is a screenshot of the number of subscribers I am about to lose in the next few days:

The number of failed renewals for Confessions of a Code Addict in last few days. Many more subscriptions have already failed to renew and expired

There are many more that I’ve already lost (the above are the ones Stripe is going to retry).

Devansh

has almost lost most of his subscribers for his publication Technology Made Simple

Declining paid subscriptions for Technology Made Simple as renewals continue to fail

It’s been an uphill battle to build a living against all the problems but it seems the hill just got steeper. I’ve been writing on Substack for the last 15 months. I’ve published over 50 articles in this time, which have been read 300,000+ times and I’ve grown from 0 to 7000+ subscribers.

Substack as a Platform

Substack is a great platform, there is a vibrant and evolving ecosystem, and you get organic growth without having to do a lot of self promotion or marketing.

In fact, as long as you consistently produce quality content, you would get almost a linear growth of subscribers and views without doing any external promotion.

On top of that, it has a great search engine reputation as well and if you write articles on hot and niche keywords, you can easily rank in top-5 results on Google. And you can get started for free.

All of this is great, but if I had to do it all over again, I would not use Substack. I started on Substack as a fulltime endeavour, because I had seen many other people finding success on the platform and I had a belief in myself that I can make things work. But I did not do enough research about the most crucial part — can I get paid here — I found the answer the hard way.

Regulatory Hurdles in India

India is a very different market than the rest of the world, and Substack has decided not to spend any resources in addressing the issues for Indian writers. If you are an India based creator or a small business, there are a ton of challenges that you have to go through to get paid online.

In 2021, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) introduced new regulations for recurring online payments which required an additional authentication step from the customer. And if the amount is more than INR 5000, then there is an additional confirmation step. These new rules broke subscription based payments in the country for months and things still don’t work reliably.

There are other rules as well, such as the tokenization of card details before saving them. This meant that every e-commerce website had to ask the customers to reenter their card details and ask for their permission for saving it.

The regulations also require that the details of the customers be saved in a server located in India. Additionally, every transaction needs to include the customer name, and their address.

Also, if you want to get paid from international customers, you need to be a registered business in India.

I am not the most literate person about these rules, so I might be misphrasing a few details. But the point is that probably no other country in the world has rules like these.

Substack’s Integration Issues with Stripe for India

Stripe, the largest payment processor in the world has struggled to implement all of these Indian regulations. Recently, they announced that they will not accept new Indian businesses because of the regulation issues in the country.

However, from what I’ve seen in Stripe’s documentation, they seem to have handled most of these rules in their APIs. It is the integration which needs to follow them. For instance, Substack uses Stripe and they have not done the integration for India right.

There are many many issues plaguing Substack’s Stripe integration. The following are the few that I’ve seen most in my Stripe logs or reported by my subscribers.

Payment in Indian Rupees

If you are an India based writer on Substack and decide to monetize, you cannot accept payment in any other currency apart from Indian Rupees (INR). Stripe has a currency loclaization feature, which means that if enabled then your international customers will see the amount in their local currency and be charged in their local currency.

However, if you are based in India, then to enable this you have to be a registered business or sole proprietor. But that’s the regulatory requirement. Even if you follow it, Substack will not enable this feature for you because it requires specific integration work for Indian authors.

Charging in INR means that many subscribers will not decide to pay because they are not familiar with the conversion rate. And if the few people who do decide to figure out the conversion rate and decide to pay you will have their cards blocked or the transaction declined because the banks consider payment in INR as a possible fraudulent activity.

Substack refuses to fix this issue.

Failed Transactions for Not Following Indian Regulations

Because of the currency issue, things have already been a hit and a miss. But, there are many more integration issues. For instance, there is the issue of card tokenization for Indian cards. If an Indian subscriber tries to subscribe, their card details need to be tokenized and saved.

For a while I’ve seen errors in my Stripe logs about this. Although, I’ve a few Indian subscribers so I am not hundred percent sure when this works and when it doesn’t.

Limit of INR 5000 Per Transaction

For a long while, the RBI had a limit of allowing automatic recurring transactions up to INR 5000. If it exceeded that limit, then there was an additional step required from the paying customer.

Of course, Substack was not following it, as a result I had to set up my annual subscription plan at INR 4999. However, it meant that I was staring at remaining fixed at that price for the rest of the foreseeable future, until Substack fixed the issue, or the RBI increased the limit.

It turns out, in December 2023, the RBI increased this limit to INR 15,000.

Saving Customer Name and Address

Despite all of these issues, things were working with a 50-50% chance. It turns out even that was a fluke. Banks and payment gateways seem to have gotten more strict in following the Indian regulations and now all International transactions on Substack seem to be failing, whether they are new, or renewals.

Substack needs to pass the customer name and address as part of the transaction details which they don’t do. For a long time, I’ve seen a few of such errors in my logs, but now that’s all I see.

Few of my readers who have been supporting my work for months reached out to me and told me that they were seeing this issue. And they were unable to pay even with other cards.

Concluding Thoughts

Day by day, my monthly subscribers are going down. At this rate, I will probably lose all of them by next month and the annual subscribers will also go away whenever their renewals are due.

I’ve reached out again to Substack support but their stance has always been that they are a small team and India is not the priority for them at the moment.

All of this has been very hard to deal with in the last two months. When you see the number of people supporting you decline despite you continue to push yourself, it is very disheartening and puts doubts in your head if you are not producing anything valuable.

Maybe I need to find a new home outside of Substack. I’ve started to offer alternative ways to support my work such as buy me a coffee, and GitHub sponsorship. But these are not native to Substack. The reader has to take multiple additional steps to pay through those.

At this point I am contemplating my options. I do plan to continue to write and do the activities I’ve been doing because intellectually they have been very rewarding, but I need to earn a living as well.