beehiiv Expects Revenue to Nearly Double to $50 Million. Can Its Flat-Fee Model Challenge Substack?

The idea came from a problem Tyler Denk saw firsthand.

Tyler Denk was Morning Brew's second employee and led product and engineering. He helped scale the newsletter from approximately 100,000 to more than 3.5 million subscribers before its acquisition, which valued Morning Brew at $75 million. Doing so required connecting different tools for sending emails, hosting content, and managing advertising.

That problem was not unique to Morning Brew.

In a review, newsletter creator Omid Ghiam described trying Mailchimp, other independent platforms, and Substack before settling on beehiiv. He wrote that building a newsletter often required several tools for publishing, monetization, and referrals, which could become expensive. He viewed beehiiv's effort to combine those functions in one platform as one of its main advantages.

That focus has continued as beehiiv has expanded. In a November 2025 interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Denk said his thesis from the beginning was that creators, journalists and publishers primarily want to grow faster and make more money. The company has consequently expanded beyond newsletter publishing into areas such as websites, commerce and podcasts, while also developing its advertising network.

Denk compared the broader strategy to Shopify: providing infrastructure that sits behind a creator's business rather than requiring creators to build their entire media operation inside beehiiv.

He and his co-founders, Hargett and Hurd, spent months building in private before going public. Denk announced the private beta in June 2021, writing on LinkedIn that it followed "8 months of long nights and weekends." In October 2021, beehiiv announced its public release following a successful private beta, saying the beta had already drawn a waitlist of "several hundred qualified leads."

The company launched publicly the following month, in November 2021.

Since then, referrals and word of mouth have become important parts of beehiiv's growth. Denk has discussed referral-driven growth in multiple interviews, while Reuters reported that a significant share of new users comes through word of mouth.

According to Denk, beehiiv reached $1 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR) 14 months after launch and $5 million 12 months later. The intervals then shortened: $10 million ARR came nine months later, followed by $15 million six months after that, with subsequent $5 million milestones arriving roughly every four to five months.

The $50 million figure for 2026 is different: it is beehiiv's revenue forecast for the year, not reported ARR or revenue already earned.

Publisher earnings are a separate metric. According to beehiiv's 2026 State of Paid Newsletters report, publishers generated approximately $8 million in paid-subscription revenue through the platform in 2024 and $19 million in 2025. That money went to publishers, not beehiiv, which says it takes no platform share of paid subscriptions, although payment-processing fees still apply.

Through the beehiiv Ad Network, advertisers pay to promote their products in newsletters, and publishers earn a share of the revenue. Boosts, now called paid recommendations, use a similar marketplace model in which publishers are paid for subscriber referrals. beehiiv retains a 20% fee on those transactions.

Substack and beehiiv solve the same problem with opposite economics.

Substack takes 10% of a writer's subscription revenue, in addition to payment-processing fees. beehiiv instead offers paid subscriptions on its Scale plan, starting at $43 a month when billed annually, without taking a percentage of subscription revenue. Using that starting price and comparing platform fees alone, the crossover point is roughly $430 in monthly subscription revenue: 10% of $430 equals $43. At $10,000 a month, Substack's 10% share would be $1,000, while the starting monthly equivalent for beehiiv's annually billed Scale plan is $43.

Sacra, a research firm that tracks private-company revenue, estimated Substack's annualized revenue at $45 million by July 2025, up from $37 million in 2024. Its estimate was based on roughly $450 million in gross writer revenue, on which Substack applies its 10% platform fee. Sacra also found that Substack's platform volume is concentrated: top earners account for close to 10% of platform transaction volume, and some high-revenue writers have already left for beehiiv or Ghost to avoid the fee.

The economics create different incentives as a newsletter grows. For a small publisher earning less than the crossover point, Substack's percentage fee can cost less than beehiiv's Scale plan. As subscription revenue increases, however, a flat fee becomes increasingly attractive because the platform cost does not rise alongside publisher revenue.

Two documented moves from Substack to beehiiv illustrate the trade-offs publishers can face when choosing between the platforms.

Fashion journalist Amy Odell built Back Row on Substack starting in 2021, turning on paid subscriptions a year later and growing past 66,000 subscribers by the time Reuters reported on her move to beehiiv. Her stated reason was the flat-fee model itself: as paid subscription revenue grew, Substack's percentage-based fee became a larger cost, while beehiiv's platform fee did not scale with that revenue.

Seamus Hughes moved his newsletter, Court Watch, from Substack to beehiiv in late 2024 as part of beehiiv's "Media Collective" program. Writing to subscribers five months later, he said the switch brought real advantages: beehiiv covered the cost of legal review for sensitive stories and gave him more control over his site. But he also described a downside. Substack's built-in recommendation algorithm had been a source of new subscribers, and losing it meant slower growth that depended mainly on word of mouth. By his own account, Court Watch was "essentially breaking even" between subscriber revenue and costs at the time he wrote it.

Together, the cases illustrate the central trade-off. Odell's move illustrates the financial appeal of a flat fee for a successful paid newsletter, while Hughes's experience shows what a publisher can lose by leaving Substack's built-in discovery network.

beehiiv says roughly one in seven new users comes from Substack, suggesting that migration is meaningful but represents only one source of new users. Its ad network, product expansion, referrals, and customers arriving from elsewhere also contribute to the broader business.

beehiiv is still spending to expand its business rather than settling into steady margins. Unlike Substack, it does not automatically earn more platform revenue when a publisher's paid subscriptions grow. That makes its other revenue streams, including software subscriptions, advertising, and paid recommendations, particularly important.

The company is also investing beyond newsletters themselves. It has expanded into websites, commerce, podcasts, advertising, and acquisitions as it tries to become broader infrastructure for creator-led media businesses.

To make the bet pay off, beehiiv needs publishers to keep paying for the platform and using its other products, not simply growing their subscriber counts.

beehiiv's strategy depends on being more than a place to send newsletters. Its expansion into advertising, websites, commerce, podcasts, and other tools reflects Denk's stated ambition to provide the infrastructure behind a creator's broader media business.

The question is whether enough publishers will pay for that broader ecosystem to turn beehiiv's rapid growth into a sustainable business.

beehiiv has already demonstrated that the flat-fee model can support rapid growth. What it hasn't demonstrated yet is profitability. Reuters reported that the company remains unprofitable, and Denk doesn't expect that to change until 2027.

That leaves beehiiv with a different challenge from the one it faced at launch. It no longer needs to prove that publishers will pay for an alternative to Substack. It needs to prove that serving them without taking a cut of their subscription revenue can become a sustainable business.