Most Stripe accounts on Substack are “Standard Connect”, which essentially means that:

  1. the author has full agency over their account and is the merchant of record;
  2. they can revoke OAuth access from Substack (or whomever) at any time;
  3. Substack continues to take that 10% as an application fee, though the author (or another connected account) can remove that fee once the OAuth access is revoked.

A couple edge cases accounts, though, are “Express Connect” (like Talia!) This means that:

  1. the author has full agency over their account and is the merchant of record;
  2. but they cannot eject their account from Substack — the account is irrevocably tied to being a “subaccount” of Substack.

For such accounts, though, you can still remove yourself and retain subscriber state/information with two steps:

  1. Migrate customer data from the original account to a new “standard” account using Stripe’s built-in migration tooling;
  2. Export subscriptions from the original account via CSV, and then recreate those original subscriptions based on the details within the CSV

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I'm Justin Duke — a software engineer, writer, and founder. I currently work as the CEO of Buttondown, the best way to start and grow your newsletter, and as a partner at Third South Capital.

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