If you haven't turned on paid subscriptions for your Substack, Pledges are a feature that lets your audience show you they believe your work is valuable.
Pledges allows your subscribers to pledge to become a paid subscriber if and when you turn on paid subscriptions.
If you started your Substack recently, pledges are turned on by default. If you started a while back, you may have to turn them on manually. Head to your publication's Settings page and scroll to the Payments section.
To turn on Pledges, click on the toggle next to Allow readers to pledge subscriptions.
You can control the pricing for monthly, yearly, and founding subscriptions. You can set them to whatever you want. The default pricing for pledges is $8/month and $80/year. The lower limit for pledge amounts is $5/month and $30/year, because those are the lower limits for Substack subscription prices. There is no upper limit.
Tip: If you’re not sure whether you should go paid yet, turning on pledges can help by letting readers demonstrate their willingness to support you. Readers have to type in their credit cards to make a pledge, so even a few pledges is a big positive signal!
What readers will see
Once you have pledges turned on, whenever new readers sign up for your publication via email, after they provide their email address they’re taken to a screen where they’re invited to make a pledge. If they'd like to continue without pledging, they can select "No pledge".
Subscribers must enter their payment information to complete their pledge, but there will be no immediate charge. If you turn on paid subscriptions, their pledges will turn into recurring paid subscriptions. (If you never turn on paid, they’re never charged.)
Subscribers who make pledges are invited to write a message about why they'd like to support your publication, which you can read.
Tip: We want to make it as easy as possible for readers to support you. If we have a reader’s credit card on file, those credit card details will be automatically pre-filled when they view your pledge page.
How to view your pledges
When a subscriber pledges to pay for a subscription, you'll be notified by email.
To see a full list of your Pledges: from your Dashboard, in the navigation bar along the top, click on Stats, and then Pledges. Here, you'll see the number of pledges, potential annualized revenue from pledges, and any notes subscribers have sent.
How to promote Pledges
Pledges work on auto-pilot. Free subscribers who view your posts on the web while logged into their Substack account will see prompts to “Pledge your support” instead of "Subscribed" buttons.
If you have Pledges turned on, a “Subscribe” button that you drop into a post turns into a “Pledge your support” button in an email to a reader who is signed up for your free list. Use the Preview feature in the editor to check out how it will look.
Tip: Readers type in their credit card when they make a pledge, so pledges instantly become recurring subscriptions when you turn on paid subscriptions, as long as you set your monthly and annual plan prices at or below the pledge amounts.
How to accept pledges
If your readers have given you pledges, you’ll see them on your dashboard under Pledged Annualized Revenue:
To accept pledges, simply click on Pledged Annualized Revenue, which brings you to your Stats page. From there, click on Pledges. Then click the button that says Accept Payments. Have your banking information handy.
Doing this will bring you through the flow to connect your publication to Stripe and set your payment tiers. You’ll be invited to input your banking information, then brought back to Substack to set your payment plans. (More information about payment plans: How do paid subscriptions on Substack work?)
When you set up payments and connect to Stripe, your pledges will automatically begin converting to paid subscriptions. It can take up to a few hours for the new paid subscriptions to appear on your Subscribers dashboard.
Readers who've pledged will automatically get an email notifying them that their pledge converted to a recurring paid subscription.
If you're enabling payments and setting a subscription plan price higher than the pledge plan amounts, we'll display the number of mismatched pledges and the pledge amount (example below).
If you toggle on the option Accept pledges at any price, your pledges will automatically convert to paid subscriptions at the price point pledged. Note that they’ll renew in future at the original price they pay.
If you toggle off the option Accept pledges at any price, the pledges will not convert; instead, the people who’ve given you a pledge will get an email inviting them to pay the higher price that you’ve set for paid subscriptions.
There are already more than 2.5 million paying subscriptions to Substack publications!