Substack

Welcome to Buttondown! After you've read through our "Welcome to Buttondown!" guide, we're here to help you with your next step: transferring your subscribers and archives from Substack to Buttondown.

Most Substack migrations take us less than 24 hours, and we don't charge for them. If you'd rather not think about any of this, just email concierge@buttondown.com with your Substack URL and we'll handle the export, the archive import, the subscriber import, and the paid subscriptions — start to finish.

If you'd rather do it yourself, the rest of this page walks through it step-by-step. Here's an overview:

1. Export your data from Substack
2. Import your archives to Buttondown
3. Import your subscribers to Buttondown
4. Importing your paid subscriptions (optional)
5. Contact Substack to remove the 10% application fee (optional)
6. Delete your Substack account

A self-serve migration usually takes 15–30 minutes of active work for a typical newsletter, plus some background import time for larger subscriber lists.

To get this data you'll log into your Substack account and do the following:

1. Navigate to the Dashboard → Publication Settings
2. Select "Import/Exports" from the menu
3. Under "Export your data" click "New export". (This will include both your subscribers and your archives.)
4. Download this export (This will be a zip file)

Here's what this looks like:

Not seeing the option to export? Make sure you're looking at the settings for the Publication itself. This can be found on this page:

https://YOUR-NEWSLETTER-NAME-HERE.substack.com/publish/settings#import-export-settings

Now that you have the export from Substack, you're ready to start importing into Buttondown!

1. Log into your Buttondown account
2. Navigate to the Emails tab
3. Click "Import" in the top toolbar
4. Select this zip file

Your data import should only take a few moments to complete. Your past Substack posts should now appear in the "Emails" tab of your Buttondown dashboard.

Now you can import your subscribers.

1. In your downloads, double click the export zip to "uncompress" the folder
2. Go back to your Buttondown dashboard
3. Navigate to the Subscribers tab
4. Click Import in the top toolbar. A pop-up window will appear.
5. Open the now uncompressed export folder
6. Select the CSV of subscriber (This file will be named something along the lines of: email_list.[YOURNAME].csv)
7. Click Done.

It can take anywhere from a few seconds to a few hours for Buttondown to import all of your data, depending on the number of subscribers you're adding. In some cases, if you're importing a large quantity of new subscribers, we may temporarily deactivate your account to make sure everything is working correctly.

After your import completes, you'll receive a notification from Buttondown, and will be able to view your subscriber data in the "Subscribers" tab of your dashboard.

If you offered paid subscriptions on Substack, you can easily transfer these to Buttondown!

Substack and Buttondown use the same payment processor: Stripe. Because you're not changing your payment processor, your subscribers won't have to re-enter their credit card information or re-confirm their subscriptions.

In addition to a Stripe account, you'll also need a paid Buttondown account to manage your paid subscriptions. After you set that up, scroll down to the "Features" section in your Buttondown settings, and click the "Connect to Stripe" button. From there, follow the prompts to connect to your existing Stripe account. Be sure to use the same email and login as you do for Substack, because Stripe needs to access previous account information and payments in order to ensure that subscribers are mapped over gracefully.

For further help with setting up your account, read our dedicated Stripe integration guide.

Substack takes a 10% cut of all paid subscriptions through Stripe.

The next step will be to contact Substack's support team and ask that they "disconnect Stripe from my publication and remove the 10% application fee, without cancelling or refunding any existing subscriptions."

You've done it! Your subscriber, archive, and paid subscription data have been moved over to Buttondown.

There's just one last thing to check before you're free to delete your Substack account: Your newsletter images.

Buttondown automatically replaces the images that are hosted on Substack's CDN with ones that are hosted on Buttondown's infrastructure so that your images won't disappear. However, this replacement process can take some time. Check to confirm that all the images from your Substack posts appear in your newsletter archives.

After you've double checked that all of your images have been replaced, feel free to sign off of Substack.

If you have a question about importing your data, the Buttondown team is here to help.