---
aliases: ["Launch Premium Newsletter Tier"]
Is A: Project
Belongs to: "[[24q3]]"
Advances: "[[responsibility-grow-newsletter]]"
Status: Abandoned
Owner: "[[person-luca-rossi]]"
---
# Launch Premium Newsletter Tier

## Overview

This project explored adding a paid subscription tier to the Refactoring newsletter. The hypothesis was that a segment of the audience would pay $10/month for premium content — deeper case studies, exclusive interviews, and a private community. If successful, this would create a second revenue stream alongside sponsorships and reduce dependency on a single monetization model.

The premium tier launched in mid-July with a 2-week free trial. After 6 weeks of operation, conversion rates were significantly below projections (0.3% vs. the 2% target), and the incremental content burden was unsustainable alongside the free newsletter and podcast. The project was abandoned in early September. While the outcome was a clear negative, the experiment provided valuable data about the audience's willingness to pay and the true cost of premium content production.

## Goals

- Design the premium tier: pricing, content cadence, and exclusive features
- Set up Substack paid subscriptions with a 2-week free trial
- Create 4 premium-only deep dives to serve as the initial content library
- Acquire 200 paying subscribers within the first 6 weeks
- Evaluate viability: target a sustainable $2,000/month from paid subscriptions

## Key decisions

- **$10/month, not $5 or $15.** Benchmarked against similar engineering newsletters. $5 felt too cheap to justify the effort; $15 was above what comparable newsletters charged. $10 was the market rate, but it turned out the audience was not price-sensitive — they simply did not want to pay for content that was perceived as similar to the free tier.
- **Deep dives as the core premium offering.** Rather than gating regular newsletter issues, created separate premium-only deep dives (3,000-5,000 words). This preserved the free newsletter's value while offering something genuinely different. The problem was that the deep dives took 8-10 hours each to write, making the unit economics terrible at low subscriber counts.
- **Abandoned rather than pivoted.** Considered pivoting to a community-only premium tier (no premium content, just Discord access), but decided the timing was wrong. The audience was not large enough to sustain a vibrant paid community. Revisiting community as a concept in [[25q3-community-launch]] with a different approach.

## Notes

- The 0.3% conversion rate was the clearest signal. Industry benchmarks for engineering newsletters suggest 1-3% is typical. Being at 0.3% meant the value proposition was fundamentally off, not just undermarketed.
- The 60 subscribers who did convert were highly engaged and gave positive feedback. Several said they subscribed to "support the newsletter" rather than for the premium content itself. This suggests a patronage model (like Patreon) might work better than a content-gated model.
- The biggest cost was not financial but attentional. Writing premium deep dives while maintaining the free newsletter, podcast, and sponsor obligations created unsustainable pressure during July-August. [[person-sara-ricci]] flagged this early and was right.
- Key lesson: for a sponsorship-funded newsletter, adding paid subscriptions creates a conflict. Free reach drives sponsor value; gating content behind a paywall reduces reach. The two models work against each other unless the audience is very large. Better to focus on growing [[measure-subscribers]] and increasing sponsor rates.
- This experiment informed the decision to try [[25q1-paid-newsletter-trial]] with a completely different approach (annual pricing, bundled with podcast content).
