Fee and policy changes at Substack, beehiiv, Kit, Mailchimp, and Patreon — dated, sourced, no editorializing. Every entry links to where we found it so you can verify it yourself.
Announced June 16, 2025: any creator publishing a new Patreon page after August 4, 2025 is placed on a standard 10% platform fee, replacing the old Lite (5%) / Pro (8%) / Premium (12%) tiers for new pages. Creators who published before the cutoff keep their existing rate — but lose it if they ever unpublish and republish their page.
Source: Patreon Help CenterAnnounced June 6, 2024 and completed October 1, 2024 with the acquisition of the kit.com domain. The product itself — features, pricing, login — was unchanged by the rebrand; it introduced the Creator Network (cross-newsletter recommendations) alongside the name change.
Source: Kit's own rebrand announcementFor subscribers who sign up from July 2024 onward, Stripe's billing fee on Substack subscriptions is 0.7% (up from 0.5%). Creators whose subscribers signed up before the cutoff kept the 0.5% rate on a grandfathered basis through June 30, 2025. Substack's own 10% platform fee is unchanged, but the effective total creators lose (platform fee + Stripe processing + billing fee) increased.
Source: beehiiv (fee breakdown, corroborated against Substack's published rates)Before this change, beehiiv's Scale plan was a single flat price covering up to 100,000 subscribers. It was replaced with pricing that steps up at 10K, 25K, 50K, and 75K subscriber thresholds — cheaper for smaller lists on the plan, more expensive for publishers who had been near the old 100K ceiling.
Source: beehiiv Pricing FAQMailchimp reduced its free-plan contact limit to 500 and changed billing to count all contacts toward your plan tier — including unsubscribed and non-subscribed ones — unless you manually archive them. This became one of the most-cited reasons established senders switch platforms, since list size (not sendable audience) now drives the bill.
Source: Mailchimp pricing breakdown (third-party analysis)Methodology: every entry above links to the original announcement or the most authoritative source we could find for it. We don't editorialize on whether a change is good or bad for creators — the facts and the source are the whole point. Platform terms change; always verify current terms on the platform's own pricing page before making a decision based on this list.
Know about a fee or policy change we're missing? Let us know — with a source, and we'll add it.