Don't Make These 2 Mistakes When Using Substack's Upgrade-to-Paid Button

Why you need to take a different approach in 2025

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Substack’s upgrade-to-paid button: Don’t make these two mistakes

The truth about getting people to upgrade to paid on Substack:

• It’s harder than ever.

• That’s not a bad thing if you think of it as a beautiful challenge and not something people should do because you somehow deserve it. (This is about them, not you.)

• Inspiring people to upgrade has everything to do with how and when you ask, which means not making the mistake I see 90 percent of Substack writers make when it comes to the upgrade-to-paid buttons.

The difficulty in getting paid subscribers—especially in 2025—has nothing to do with “there being too many Substacks” and Substack being “saturated” (not possible) or celebrities coming to the platform (10000% the best possible thing because they bring readers—and I won’t bring up people’s mistreatment of Glennon Doyle though I realize I just did).

It’s because subscription habits have changed. People have too many, so getting them to pay for yet another Substack is a beautiful challenge.

Upgrade-to-paid buttons 2025 best practices

Note!

• The upgrade-to-paid button is the subscribe button.

• Magically, it changes when a free subscriber encounters your post.

• Maddeningly, it will never say ‘Upgrade to paid’ on our drafts.

Yes, this is yet another way that Substack’s tech is totally unintuitive.

And yes, back in the days of yore, when I first started on Substack, I wasted many minutes of my one wild and precious life creating custom upgrade-to-paid buttons because I only saw subscribe buttons on my drafts.

Don’t make these two mistakes

Understanding and responding to subscription fatigue in 2025 starts with not making these two very, very, very common mistakes with the upgrade-to-paid button:

1. Don’t add a flurry of other buttons along with the subscribe button—share, leave a comment, message, etc.

2. Don’t put subscribe buttons in the middle of your posts (the horror!).

How to use the upgrade-to-paid button in a subscription-fatigued world

1. One to two buttons per post—no more.

• It’s important to understand how a flurry of buttons around your upgrade-to-paid button works on the human brain.

• When you ask us to do a bunch of different things—share, leave a comment, etc.—we mentally and emotionally collapse for just a moment and do nothing.

• Along with subscription fatigue, people currently suffer from acute decision fatigue. So use only one to two buttons per post.

• One of those buttons should be a subscribe/upgrade-to-paid button.

2. Don’t put the upgrade-to-paid button in the middle of your post

• When you put buttons in the middle of your posts, they act on us like a pop-up.

• Pop-ups are so 2019. We hate them, and we’ve learned how to avoid them.

• We don’t actually want to interrupt people’s reading experiences. We’re on a platform without ads (!). Don’t create one.

• Have buttons only at the beginning of the post or the end.