Welcome to Buttondown! After you've read through our "Getting Started" guide, we're here to help you with your next step: transferring your subscribers and archives from Substack to Buttondown.
Here's an overview of the migration process:
Need help migrating to Buttondown? Just contact our support team and we'll take care of it for you!
To get this data you'll log into your Substack account and do the following:
Substack has two different pages for settings: Publication settings, and Account settings. Exports are on the Publication settings.
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:
Now that you have the export from Substack, you're ready to start importing into Buttondown!
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.
email_list.[YOURNAME].csv)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're importing a large quantity of new subscribers, we may temporarily deactivate your account to make sure everything is working correctly.
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."
Substack's support has a few tiers. The first tier is a chatbot. But, you'll then be contacted by a real person over email.
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.
This video shows how to locate the "Installed apps" section of your Stripe account.
Do not disconnect Stripe via the Substack dashboard. This will cancel and refund all paid subscriptions.