Transcription
Let me guess, you have turned the paid tier on on your Substack publication, but you really struggle to gain more paid subscribers. It seems like nobody cares about upgrading. You've been showing up consistently for a while. Maybe you've already built a solid list of free subscribers, but when someone lands on your subscribe page, they see a small block of text describing what they would get behind the paywall, and they scroll right past it.
And here's the truth. It's not because your paid tier isn't valuable. It's because people don't understand why they should upgrade to your paid tier at all. The good news is that growing your paid tier on Substack got easier. In July 2026, Substack rolled out a new feature called Perks, and it turns your paid tier from three lines of buried text into a visual storefront with images, cards, and unlock buttons that visitors can actually click on. That way, you can gate specific rewards for monthly annual or founding member tiers, so that every tier actually has a specific reason to exist. And all of that is built to change the entire conversion math on paid conversions.
Now, let me be upfront about something before we go any further. This video is for creators who already have a clear direction with their publication. Coaches, consultants, educators, experts, people with real knowledge to share and a clear idea of who they are serving on their publication. If you're still figuring out who your paid tier is even for, Perks might not be the feature to focus on right now. In that case, I have tons of other videos that you can check out to get to a stage where this particular feature makes sense for you, as well. But if you already have expertise, resources you can repurpose from other channels, or a publication that's not converting the way you hoped, this is one of the highest leverage things you can set up right now.
In this video, I will walk you through what Substack Perks actually are, how the strategic layer works, and why it changes how you should think about your paid tiers. Exactly how to set it up, step by step, and what to actually put in there so that people actually upgrade. Let's get into it.
Let me start with the part that most creators completely underestimate about their paid tier. The visitor coming to your subscriber page for the very first time is making in a few seconds. And until now, Substack gave you almost no visual real estate to help them make that decision. And here's what I mean. On the standard subscribe page most publications have, you see a short list of subscriber benefits, a price, and a subscribe button. And that's it.
Now, imagine someone landing on that particular page. They see a text list that says something like access to weekly articles, community chat, exclusive Q&As. But they can't picture what any of that will actually look like. They cannot tell what they will get right away, or even at some point in the future. And more importantly, they have no idea if they will like what they get. So they close the tab, and gone they are. And this is where the real cost of the old setup shows up. You could have the most valuable paid offering in your entire niche, and it wouldn't matter because visitors won't know about it.
But Perks changes that entirely. Substack Perks is a new native tab on your publication that shows every paid reward you offer as a visual card with an image, a title, and a short description. And on top of that, you have the unlock button. If someone lands on that page, and they are already a paid member, the unlock button gives them the codes, the link, or the download, whatever the perk is. If they are a free subscriber, they see the same cards, but with a prompt to upgrade. So the same page works as both a benefits page for your existing paid members and a sales page for new members.
And here's what's actually strategic about it. You can gate specific perks for specific tiers. Some rewards can go to all your paid members. Some of them might go just to your annual and founding members. Some go to founding members only, which means every tier finally has a distinct, visible, and tangible reason to exist. And that's an entire shift on the platform altogether. Your paid tier is not a text description anymore. Instead, it's an attractive, visual storefront.
Now, here's where Substack Perks becomes strategic instead of just cosmetic. Every tier needs a distinct reason to exist. Different prices for the same thing is one of the fastest way to kill your paid conversions. Now, most creators launch their paid tier with a monthly price and an annual price, and behind both, they offer the same thing: access to their paywalled articles. Maybe an additional private subscriber chat, and that's it. So, the annual tier usually is just a slight discount, and the founding tier, if it even exists, is basically a suggestion box for a bigger donation. But, if you look at it closely, that's not really an attractive paid model. And to be fair, it wasn't easy to design an attractive paid tier before perks were available.
With Perks, you can now think of your paid tiers much more strategically. For example, you can use the tiers to map out a different level of access and a different type of transformation for your audience. And this is where Substack Perks lets you finally make that visible, tier by tier.
Now, I want to be really clear before I walk you through what this can look like. There is no one-size-fits-all answer here. How you structure your tiers depends entirely on what you have available, how your content is designed, and what your existing offers look like. And what stage of your publication you're at right now makes a big difference as well. Someone in their first 3 months on Substack is going to make a very different decision than someone with a 5-year archive and a full course library to draw from. You can give away a lot more or a lot less at each level depending on what you already have. So, take everything I'm about to share as a menu of options rather than a formula that you have to stick to.
Now, with that said, here's the general shape that will work well for most educational publications. Your monthly tier is your entry level. It's meant to be accessible enough that a curious reader can say yes without much friction. This can be access to your paywalled articles and maybe one rolling perk you rotate every month or so. It's basically a low-friction invitation to keep exploring your world.
Your annual tier is where you concentrate the substantial gated resources. This is where you can add courses, template packs, resource libraries, and ebook cheat sheets, guides that took you weeks to build. The annual tier should feel like the reader is unlocking a body of work and not just a longer subscription for your publication.
And your founding member tier is generally where you offer personal access or your highest-leverage product. Founding members are the people who want to go deeper with you specifically. So, this is where DM access, coaching calls, private mastermind sessions, or an exclusive high-ticket product make the most sense. At Write Well Scale, we are currently revamping our own founding member tier to include a personalized audit where we help Substackers see exactly what's wrong with their publication and what they need to change in order to build a best-selling publication. We made this decision because we recently published a few audits that we have done for our private coaching clients, and our audience loved them. So, we know that this is an asset that many creators would happily pay for, and that's why we decided to include it in our founding member tier. But, that same tier could just as easily be built around a specific product, a full course, or a private cohort that you're running. Whatever your highest leverage offering is, that's usually what belongs into the founding member tier.
And here's the principle behind all of this. The tiers are not really about price, at least not only. They are about promises. Every level should give the reader a clear, specific answer to the question, "What do I actually get if I go take one more step with this creator?" And Substack Perks is the tool that finally lets you answer that in a visual way.
Now, before I walk you through the actual setup, here's one quick thing. If everything so far is making you rethink how your paid tier is structured, we've put together a free resource called the Substack Bestseller Workbook that walks you through the exact foundations of a bestselling Substack publication. It covers positioning, paid tier structure, and the strategic decisions that actually determine whether people upgrade or not. If you want it, just comment workbook below and I'll send you the link so you can download it for free right away. And while you are at it, give the video a thumbs up so more creators can find it and leverage Substack Perks to reach and serve more readers.
Now, let's get into the actual setup of Perks. The first thing you need to know is that Substack Perks is only available to publications that already have payments enabled. If you don't have a paid tier set up yet, the feature won't even show up in your dashboard. It just means that Perks is a monetization feature, and if you're not monetizing yet, you just don't need this tool. For everyone with a paid tier, here's exactly where to find it. Head to your Substack publication dashboard, you click into settings, then go to payments. You scroll down past the tier descriptions, and you'll see a new section called subscriber perks. Now you can click on manage, and from there you will see any perks you've already created and a button to create a new one.
Now you can click on create perk, and Substack takes you through three specific steps. Step one is choosing the perk type. You have five options here, and each one has a specific use case. The first is discount or promo code. It could be a discount on one of your own products, a discount from a creator that you collaborate with, a code for a course, a coaching program, or anything else. Anywhere a discount code applies, this perk type works. The second is digital downloads. This is Substack hosting an actual file for you. This can be a PDF, an ebook, a workbook, a template pack. Your subscribers unlock it and download it directly on the perks page. The third is community invite. This is a link to a private space you run somewhere else. A Discord server, a Circle community, a WhatsApp group, a private group chat. Whatever community you've built outside of Substack, this is where you can give away the link to actually join. And the fourth is a link. This is the most flexible option because it's just a private URL your subscribers can unlock. This is what you use for anything that doesn't fit the other categories. This can be a private Notion page, hidden Substack posts, resource libraries, or just custom landing pages where you host anything. And the fifth is Substack live video. This one unlocks a scheduled Substack live session for your paid subscribers. So if you run private lives or masterclasses is the platform, this is how you could gate them.
Now, you obviously want to pick the one that fits and then move to step two, which is the actual content of the perk. Here, you can add a title, a description, and an image. And now, here are a few things to know about the copy on this page. Your title can be up to 200 characters, and the description can be up to 1,000 characters. But, here's the thing. Unlocking a perk is usually an impulse decision. Your readers see a card, they scan it in a second or two, and they either click on unlock or they just scroll past, which means the copy needs to be crystal clear and sharp. You don't want to fill the character count just because you can. Use whatever you actually need to make the value obvious, but cut the rest.
Now, the image you use here needs to be 1,200 by 800 pixel, and you can create it with any tool you like. Our go-to option for all things visuals is Canva, and I really recommend designing one clean template with your branding and reusing it across the entire page, because it will make this whole section look like a real product page rather than a collection of random resources.
Now, your third step is to choose the audience for each of these perks that you're creating. This is where the tier gating actually happens. Now, here you can make the perk accessible to all paid subscribers, to annual and founding only, or to founding only. So, this is where you pick whichever tier this specific perk applies to. You click publish, and the perk goes live on your perks page immediately.
Now, the most common question I get at this point is what to actually put behind these perks, because knowing how to create them is one thing, but sitting down with a blank perks page and no ideas is an entirely different story. And to be fair, most creators feel that way at first. So, let's walk through the menu of what tends to work based on what Substack itself is highlighting from creators who set this up early on.
If you already have digital products, this is the easiest starting point. If you have any kind of downloadable resource sitting on your hard drive right now that took you real time to create, that's a perk that you can use. If you've built a private community somewhere, that community is a perk. Anything that involves people gathering around a specific topic can be gated as a perk. If you are running discounts on your own products or partnering with other businesses, those discount codes are perks. A 20% off code on your Gumroad store, a discount to a partner publication on Substack, a code for a piece of software you genuinely recommend and use.
Now, if you host live sessions or masterclasses, those become perks, too. Substack live videos can be gated behind your tier, which turns your regular lives into a real reason to upgrade. And if you have deep knowledge, but you haven't packaged it into anything yet, this is actually the fastest reason for you to get started. A one-page cheat sheet for something your audience keeps asking you about, a swipe file, a template, anything that is tangible and gives people a reason to upgrade can take an afternoon to build and can become a perk for your store. The rule I would give you here is very simple. Start with one perk. Pick the thing your readers most often ask you about in comments, conversations, private messages. Build the smallest possible version of a solution to that problem. Add it as a perk to your publication and then build the next one when you have more time. You don't need 10 perks on day one. You don't need a full storefront to start. You need one that is genuinely useful and a habit of adding to it whenever you create resources for your audience that they will truly value.
Now, there's one last piece that most creators miss and it's actually the part that determines whether all of this will actually pay off or not. Once you've set up your perks, they show up on a new perks tab that Substack automatically adds to your publication's navigation bar. Now, anyone visiting your publication can see it, click on it, and browse through your rewards. That's the discovery layer and it's happening for you in the background. But, the bigger opportunity is baking perks into your welcome email. When a new subscriber joins your publication, they get your welcome email and that email is one of the most opened messages you will ever send them. Adding a line there that says, "If you're already a paid member, here's your perks page" or "Here's what you will unlock when you upgrade" turns that welcome email into a soft conversion moment for every new subscriber.
And here's the reframe that most creators completely miss. Perks is not just a conversion tool. It can actually be a massive retention tool for your existing paid members. Think about how most paid memberships work. You upgrade, you get a burst of value, and then over time you forget what you actually signed up for. And that's the moment cancellation start happening and it's not because your work stopped being good, but because they lost sight of everything they even can access. And to be fair, that happens to almost every paid membership at some point. And perks is a fantastic way to solve this problem because you can send your paid members back to the perks page regularly and in the footer of a post, in a monthly reminder, in the community chat, you can always remind them what they actually have access to. And every time they land there, they see everything that they actually already have access to. They can see the courses, the templates, the discount codes, the community, the live sessions. All of it is right there. It's clearly labeled and visible. And this is what turns a paid subscription into a real product in your readers' mind. Instead of paying for more articles, they now know why the monthly or yearly fee is worth it. Simply because they see an attractive library of specific things they actually have access to. And the paid members who feel like they actually own something, they will rarely cancel after a month or two.
Now, if you are serious about building a paid tier that people actually upgrade to and stay with, Substack Perks is one of the highest leverage things you can set up right now. It can take an afternoon to build the first version, and it changes how visitors see your publication, how new subscribers experience the welcome flow, and how existing members stay. Start with one perk, match it to the tier where it makes the most sense for your setup, and add to it over time. And send your paid members back to that page whenever possible.
Now, if you want to go beyond the setup and build a Substack that actually generates real money on top of all of this, we are running a private coaching program for coaches, consultants, experts, and educators who use Substack as the engine of their business. We work with you directly on positioning, paid tier, launch strategy, and everything else that determines whether your publication becomes a hobby or a real income stream. If you want to see whether we are the right fit for you, you can apply at SubstackCoaching.com.
And if you've set up and you're still wondering why the money isn't really flowing, you're not alone there. Even with a perfect perks page, most Substack publications still barely make a meaningful income because there's a deeper strategic mistake almost every Substacker makes without realizing it. And until you fix it, no perk or tier setup is going to move the needle. I created a full video breaking down exactly why most Substacks aren't making money and what to do instead. I'll see you there.