Beehiiv CEO and co-founder Tyler Denk giving a presentation at a Beehiiv event in London on 12 February 2026. Picture: LRock Media
The CEO of Substack rival Beehiiv says the growing platform has a key philosophical difference from its more established rival.
Both platforms have a focus on building paid newsletter audiences. But whereas Substack is establishing itself as a publishing brand in its own right, Beehiiv CEO Tyler Denk said his company believes publishers should completely own their audience.
He said Beehiiv is going down a “very divergent” path compared to Substack despite early comparisons between the two competitors.
Beehiiv has positioned itself as a platform that provides the tech and infrastructure to help both large publishers and individual creators monetise their content.
The infrastructure includes newsletters, website hosting, paid subscriptions, an advertising network and free and paid growth tools.
Podcasts are expected to launch within the next month and a community feature, which will essentially enable newsfeeds dedicated to specific publications so their users can engage with each other, will follow later this year.
Several large publications including Time, Techcrunch, Newsweek and the Boston Globe host newsletters on Beehiiv.
Journalists using the platform to launch their own newsletters and websites after leaving a legacy publication have include: former Washington Post Tiktok Guy Dave Jorgenson with Local News International , ex-The Hollywood Reporter special correspondent Lachlan Cartwright with media newsletter Breaker , former CNN media reporter Oliver Darcy with Status , and ex-CBS senior correspondent Catherine Herridge who is telling “the stories I could not tell before”.
Many other types of creators also use the platform, such as Arnold’s Pump Club (from Arnold Schwarzenegger) and internet personalities/entrepreneurs Chris Koerner and Codie Sanchez.
Denk told Press Gazette that creators on Beehiiv are approaching $5m in collective annual earnings from paid subscriptions and advertising (excluding any direct-sold deals they organise themselves).
Creators can choose whether or not to put ads from the likes of Nike, Netflix and Roku from Beehiiv’s ad network into their newsletters. If they use these pre-sold ads, Beehiiv keeps somewhere between 5% and 20% of the revenue.
Publishers can also source their own direct ad deals and keep 100%.
US-based Beehiiv has been on a charm offensive in the UK, with Denk and other key figures at the company spending a week in London in February to meet potential creators and publishers for the platform as well as existing users.
Denk said the biggest cohort of people they were meeting were “large newsrooms and publishers that are just using another piece of tech, and we’re trying to introduce ours as the better solution that we think can help them grow and make more money”.
He said many publishers are using expensive “very legacy, very antiquated” newsletter tech.
“If you can save money, you can add an ad network, and your employees are happier because it’s a better platform to use, and you are close with the leadership team who’s listening to your needs, and we’re constantly pushing out new features – I think that’s a direct 180 from what most of these antiquated platforms are offering, which are pretty bulky, haven’t been updated in years, very expensive and don’t move very quickly,” Denk said.
Beehiiv users pay a flat rate monthly fee that depends on the features they need and their number of subscribers. The two main tiers for brands with up to 100,000 subscribers are $43 (£32) per month and $96 (£71) per month.
This differs from Substack’s model of taking a 10% cut of any paid subscriptions on its platform (plus a further 4% lost to payment fees). This is why the Manchester Mill and its sister titles left Substack for Ghost in 2024 .
This is just one of several differences between Beehiiv and Substack that Denk was keen to highlight.
He said they are often compared but “I think if you look at what they’re doing directionally with the business, and what we are doing, we are kind of going into very divergent paths. They really are trying to be a social platform,” for example via the Notes feed in which Substack users can post short updates that can be seen by anyone.
Denk said: “Substack kind of has misaligned incentives with a lot of their users. They’re taking part of their revenue that they’re generating, and are very intentionally pushing growth across the network, where they kind of take your readers and try to cross promote them to other readers, because at the end of the day, they have a mobile app, and they want you to subscribe to as many newsletters on their mobile app as possible…
“So that kind of conflicts with the publishers on the platform that are actually trying to build their distinct, standalone brand.”
Beehiiv, conversely, is “fully on the owned audience, owned distribution side of the things, where you have your own website, your own newsletter, your own podcast, we’ll eventually launch community as well, where you can actually engage with your audience one layer deeper. And so I think the owned audience umbrella is really the tech that we’re building.”
The Guardian reported in February that some paid-for Substack newsletters promote Nazi ideology.
Denk said he does not believe Beehiiv hosts any pro-Nazi content but acknowledged there is likely to be both “wide left and wide right” on the platform.
He said Beehiiv has terms of service against content that, for example, incites violence and that they have “had no problems kicking off users on the platform who cross whatever line that we deem is unacceptable”.
“And for us, it’s easy, because they’re paying us $79 a month and it’s not a big part of our business, and we aren’t incentivised to keep them on. So if we think that they are net worse for the ecosystem and our brand, it’s very easy to remove them.
“I think where you see Substack having troubles is that could be hundreds of thousands of dollars of revenue that they’re kicking off the platform,” he continued, referring to the subscription fees model.
“Content moderation is hard, and we try to stay as far away from it… I think we’re very loose, but we’ve had no problems removing people.”
Why The Nerve chose to launch on Beehiiv
Sarah Donaldson, co-founder of UK journalism outlet The Nerve which was launched by a group of ex-Observer journalists in September 2025 , told a conference organised by Beehiiv at Google’s London HQ on12 February that they chose the platform because Substack has “developed more of a strategy of becoming a social media platform, we think”. She said Substack’s Notes feed feels “a bit like being on Twitter of old, posting things and recommending”.
She said: “One of the things we’re covering is technology. We didn’t really want to just send our audience to another social media platform and another app.
“And also Substack doesn’t really have design functionality at the front end: your homepage is the same as everyone else’s homepage. There’s very little you can do to change it.”
Sarah Donaldson of The Nerve presenting at Beehiiv’s event in London on 12 February 2026. Picture: LRock Media
Donaldson said The Nerve team also considered Ghost which has “a lot of design freedom” but that “it’s not really an integrated platform – you have to add other software in the backend to take payments if you have membership or subscribers, and it required a lot of technical work that we don’t have.”
What sold the team on Beehiiv, she said, was “how integrated it is, so you have the newsletter function that sends out your newsletter, it joins up to a really good website builder… and then also it does all the Stripe link-up to run your payments. It’s just a very good functionality of dividing your audience up, gives you a lot of control.”
Why Beehiiv is offering legal backing to independent journalists
The Nerve is part of Beehiiv’s Media Collective, which provides benefits such as legal support and pre-publication reviews, health insurance, access to tools like Perplexity Pro and Getty Images, and extra platform support to around 30 journalists.
Denk said the programme was created at the start of 2025 in response to feedback from journalists that “when they go independent, they obviously lose access to a lot of the things that they maybe took for granted as being part of a larger newsroom”.
He added: “Independent journalism is hard, right? So we try to make it as easy as possible to be able to prove out that model.”
After more than a third of Washington Post journalists were laid off at the start of February , Denk offered a year free on the platform (waiving the monthly fee) to any of them who wanted to go it alone and he noted many of them would qualify for the Media Collective as well.
Asked if it is particularly beneficial to have hard news on the platform compared to other types of content, Denk said: “I don’t think it matters. I think we’re pretty unopinionated on the type of content that can succeed on the platform… I think every creator and writer is kind of figuring out their own best business model, whether it’s IRL events or ads or sponsors, and we’re just playing a part of being a platform to help support that.”
Beehiiv ‘going for growth over profitability’
Beehiiv was launched in late 2021 by Denk and two other early Morning Brew employees. It is not yet profitable and does not expect to be in 2026 but Denk said they have “a path towards profitability in 2027”.
He noted, however, that they have many competitors as well as Substack: “ Patreon has entered into newsletters and seems to be trying to make a comeback in this area. Some of the other email platforms since we’ve entered the market have definitely picked it up and been a bit more aggressive with what they’re trying to do. And so I’d say we’re in a very competitive space.”
Beehiiv raised $33m in its Series B funding round in 2024, [taking it to a total of $46.5m raised.](https://techcrunch.com/2024/04/30/beehiiv-newsletters/) It has a team of around 110 people based in various countries including the US and UK.
Denk added: “We’re definitely going for growth over profitability. We have over $30m (£22m) in the bank. We have three plus years of runway. We’re good, we’re not raising money right now, and are well financed.”
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