"should I get rid of flodesk if I start using substack?"

a guide to the great email platform wars of 2025 from a person who's been sending typos in newsletters ~professionally~ since 2013

I like email.

My first internet thrill was probably the dopamine hit of seeing ‘You’ve Got Mail’ on my AOL account (tutus4me89@aol.com, call me beep me).

I cut my teeth building email newsletters and sales strategies for the startups I worked with, writing endless options quippy subject lines that would yield high open rates.

So it made sense when I started Holisticism in 2017 to start with an email newsletter, even though it was objectively unsexy compared to the Instagram aesthetic industrial complex that was busy turning everyone into their own personal brand manager.

This is all to say — I’ve always been bullish on email, and odds are good that if you’ve spoken to me for more than three minutes in the last ten years I’d have encouraged you to start your own email list.

But it’s not 2015. No one is still asking ‘Do I need an email list?’ because that’d be like saying, “Should I upgrade from an ethernet cable to wifi?” Like, duh.

The questions people are asking, though?

“Do I need Substack if I have Flodesk or Kit?”

“Can I get rid of my email service provider if I have a Substack?”

“What do I send on Substack vs. what should I send on Flodesk?”

Basically: What’s the deal with sending emails in 2025?

Well, pull up a chair, pour yourself a tall glass of a seasonally appropriate beverage, and let’s get to the bottom of The Email Question.

What’s the point?

There are basically two ways to send emails to a large group of people:

1. An email publishing platform — like Substack, Ghost, Buttondown, beehiiv, Tinyletter (RIP), etc.

2. An email service provider (ESP) — like Flodesk, Kit (fka ConvertKit), Drip, Campaign Monitor, Mailchimp (aka the devil but uglier)

There are all-in-one tools that also allow you to send emails to a large group — Dubsado, Kajabi, Squarespace, Shopify — but they usually have limited capabilities. That said, you can file these types of email senders under ESPs.

Before we get into the technical stuff, we must go existential. Grab your emotional support beverage and your most pretentious journal — we’re going deep.

Here’s your prompt: Why are you doing this? Why are you sending emails?

I think we can sort the WHY into six-ish general categories:

1. To grow an audience

2. To warm up an audience

3. To send a sales pitch

4. To establish credibility / expertise / publish original ideas

5. To connect with others

6. To practice writing

From these categories, we can assume one of three desired outcomes:

• to increase my authority or influence as a subject matter expert to ultimately get paid for my knowledge and expertise

• to grow my business revenue

• to grow personally and creatively

It’s totally reasonable to fall under more than one category. Maybe you feel like all six categories resonate. Try to rank your why as honestly as possible; if you could only pick one thing that you wanted your emails to do, what would it be?

OK, hold that thought in your mind. Now that you know what you’re trying to do with electronic mail, you can better decide whether to use an Email Publishing Platform (EPPs), an Email Service Provider (ESPs), or both.

Re: Email Publishing Platforms

Let’s start with Email Publishing Platforms, because hi, I’m sending this from Substack, the Bella Hadid of EPPs.

The primary function of an EPP is to — you guessed it! — send a blog-style email to an audience of subscribers. An EPP wants to help you grow your audience, deliver your content to your existing audience, and make the process of sending your newsletter easier because usually these platforms make their money off of monthly fees you pay to use the software. (Substack is free to use, but takes a 10% cut of your paid revenue)

They want you to continue to use their hosting service and software so you continue to pay the monthly fee — and that’s fair, because these platforms do a great job of simplifying almost all of the elements of the email newsletter process with strategic tools.

The main features of an EPP:

• easy opt-in to your email publication

• an accessible, searchable archive of your previous missives

• you can host your content without needing a website or url

• simple design (so you don’t get caught up in email layout purgatory)

• built-in monetization for your content; paywall technology

• network effects tools to help you grow your audience — could be a discoverable algorithm, or a gamefication to encourage your readers to share your publication with their friends to win prizes, or any easy way to collaborate and share audiences with other publications

• some community element — maybe comments from subscribers, a live chat feature, live video elements… something that helps your subscribers see that there are other people who also subscribe to your work

Honestly, EPPs are great. I love ‘em. But there is a catch — you are not supposed to use EPPs like Substack for “email marketing.”

Weird, because technically Substack is email marketing, so what the hell does that mean? According to ‘stack’s FAQs:

We don’t permit publications that are set up with the sole purpose of advertising an external product or service. […] Substack is intended for high quality editorial content, not conventional email marketing. We don’t permit publications whose primary purpose is to advertise external products or services, drive traffic to third-party sites, distribute offers and promotions, enhance search engine optimization, or similar activities.

Keyword here is primary purpose. That means you can promote things, but you shouldn’t make your email list / publication only for sending ads or promotion. For example, sending a series of dedicated sales emails for a product that is NOT your paid Substack subscription could get you kicked off the platform.

[OK not to be a semantic stickler but can we address the Reformation dress-wearing elephant in the room? I see so many fashion newsletters that are truly just vehicles for RewardStyle affiliate links which seems suspiciously like driving “traffic to third-party sites” and advertising external products or services but what do I know ¯\(ツ)/¯ ]

On top of that, many of these EPPs don’t have API options, which means you can’t automatically send an email confirmation when someone buys something from you, or when a client clicks on a certain link in your newsletter. No API means you’re basically doing digital manual labor like it’s 1999 and you’re living on a floppy disk and a prayer. Not a fan!

Anyway, that’s all to say that if you are selling products and services beyond your paid tier on Substack, you’ll need an Email Service Provider (ESP) in addition to your EPP.

Use an EPP when:

• you want to grow your audience organically through your original content

• you want a “blog” or microsite feel for your content; a living archive that people can search through and binge

• you want to develop your brand voice, authority, and thought leadership

• you want to utilize paywalls on your content

• you want to develop your own creativity and practice writing in public

• you want to build a dialogue with your audience

Email platform publishers prioritize CONTENT and AUDIENCE GROWTH.

So when do you use an Email Service Provider (ESPs)?

GRANNY VOICE: Back in my day, all we had to choose from were email service providers!

But really — it used to be that every newsletter, every link to a blog post, any email you sent to your audience was done through an ESP.

If you want to send newsletters and write blog posts but don’t want to set up a Substack to do so, you can still totally do that with an ESP. But it probably won’t be a totally seamless process (totally OK, btw, as long as YOU have a clear process for yourself).

The main value of an ESP is that it’s used to convert email list leads into paying customers.

Most ESPs make money by either:

• charging you for the number of email subscribers you have — the more you have, the more you pay

• charging a flat monthly subscription fee, a la any SaaS product

• charging you for the number of subscribers on your list and a flat subscription fee 🙃

The features of ESPs focus primarily on converting subscribers into customers and usually include:

• A/B testing of subject lines, CTAs, or layouts

• in-depth analytics on open rates, CTR, bounce rates, unsubscribes, link tracking, customer interactions, conversions, etc.

• the ability to tag, sort, and segment customers into specific groups

• automated workflows and drip campaigns (multi-email campaigns that you can preschedule that are triggered by specific events, like clicking on a certain link or opting in to a specific segment via a lead magnet)

• customizable, optimized designs and layouts

• stand-alone opt-in pages

• optimized sales pages

If you want to send 30 sales emails to your 200 person audience over the span of 3 hours, your ESP will be all, “Do you, baby boo.” Email Service Providers prioritize OPTIMIZING SALES.

If you sell a physical or digital product, you need an ESP. If you sell a service, you need an ESP.

Would you ever use both?

Hell yeah, brother.

We use Substack (EPP) and Flodesk (ESP) at Holisticism.

Substack has hosted our newsletter and podcast for the last year — it’s basically a blog. We also have paywalled content on Substack, shout out to our 12H+ subscribers we 💗 u!

Our audience has grown much faster and with more ease on Substack than it did when I was only using an ESP thanks to the Substack algorithm. Before Substack, I’d have to:

• write a blog post and publish to our website

• include an “opt-in” lead magnet on the blog page to incentivize people to sign up for our newsletter

• use SEO to drive search engine traffic to the blog post

• repost on social media in various ways (IG, TikTok, Pinterest, Facebook) to try and drive traffic to the blog post, then hope they’d convert to the email list

• send an email to my existing email subscribers with a link to read the newest blog post

• rinse and repeat 2-3x a week

It was a tedious process that was inconsistent and challenging at times, especially compared to the streamlined nature of publishing on Substack.

Now I just write my content in my Notion Editorial Calendar, paste into Substack’s editor, schedule the post, and that’s it! (In the time I wrote this paragraph we gained three new subscribers on Substack, probably due to some kind, thoughtful, genius person sharing one of our posts. Easy breezy beautiful, covergirl.)

Flodesk is my OG email platform and possibly my one true love. I’ve been a customer since the company was in beta in 2018 and I decided to take the leap from Campaign Monitor.

It was getting expensive to host my emails on CM, and at the time Flodesk was flat fee of $19 a month. Felt like a no brainer to at least try it out.¹ And I can confidently say that I’ve never felt the desire to switch to another ESP over the last 7 years.

Are there platforms that have more complexity, more functionality, more bells and whistles? Yes, of course. But for what I do — segmented sales emails, some evergreen funnels, sales pages, some automated workflows, deliver digital products via email — Flodesk is powerful enough.

My biggest gripe with Substack is that’s stupidly difficult to segment your email list. Segmenting your list allows you to send specific emails to very specific subgroups within your larger list. This practice helps you from what we call “burning out” your list; basically, sending impersonal emails to your list every day will eventually make them exhausted / turned off. It’s annoying to hear about something that doesn’t apply to you.

But if you’ve opted in to a lead magnet about preparing for eclipses, and then I email you about an eclipse moon circle I’m hosting, you’re probably psyched to hear from me because I have something you want.

Substack doesn’t really allow for segmenting (at least not creating permanent segments you can save to use for later) which is tedious. Flodesk has some pretty easy-to-set-up workflows and automations that are simply impossible to recreate on Substack.

Finally, I’m a huge fan of Flodesk’s sales page templates because they’re 1) gorgina, 2) very highly converting! 3) proof that you don’t need a website in order to get started (but maybe think about getting that website up eventually…)

The Final Boss Battle: Your Email Strategy Decision Tree

Are you primarily here to serve intellectual content and build your personal brand as the main character of your niche?
EPP it is, queen. Substack will literally do the heavy lifting while you focus on being brilliant and gorgeiouse.

Are you selling actual products and need to convert subscribers into paying customers without getting kicked off platforms for being too salesy?
Ya need an ESP. Flodesk, Kit, whatever makes your little capitalist heart sing.

Are you an ambitious chaos agent who wants to do both?
Same. My advice is to get really clear on what you plan to use each platform for before you take action.

For me, Substack is how I share a weekly newsletter and publish our podcast — that’s it. Everything else is done on Flodesk.

“Just do it.” — Me (Nike)

No need to overthink it. Pick your platform(s), commit to showing up in a way that makes you feel good (if not a teensy bit uncomfortable), and remember that the best email strategy is the one you’ll actually execute.

At the end of the day, all the Substack algorithms and Flodesk automations in the world can’t save you from the Demons of Procrastination.

Now go forth and fill some inboxes. Your people are waiting. 💌

P.S. - If this post convinced you to finally start that newsletter you’ve been talking about for six months two years, tag me when you launch it. I liiiiive for this kind of main character moment.

Liked this?
You’ll love Holisticism and our podcast The Twelfth House.

Want to learn more about intuitive business and creator-ship?
Sign up for the North Node waitlist here.

Into my persnickety personality and strategic perspective?
Inquire about 1:1 advising with me here. ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠

1. I’m an affiliate partner of Flodesk — if you use this link, you’ll get your first year at 50% off. Heads up: Flodesk is enacting a price change at the end of November and will no longer offer their Unlimited Plan, which is $35 a month for unlimited email sends and unlimited subscribers. TBH that price is kind of a bananas steal, but if you snag it now you’ll be grandfathered in to that price point as long as you’re on Flodesk.

You can try out Flodesk’s 14-day trial and still have plenty of time to decide if you want to stay on the platform before the price increase goes into action on November 28.