SubstackReviews of substack.com

Their platforms and websites are very difficult to navigate - everything feels overwhelming and disorganised. The actual book club itself seems like a minor side activity while they constantly market authors and events. When I joined a monthly book club meeting, there were only about eight people attending. It certainly didn’t feel like “the first and largest self-help book club” as advertised. It’s also very unclear what you’re subscribing to. The unsubscribe button is hidden and takes ages to find. There’s no phone number or proper email contact, just an automated system that promises a refund but then says it can’t process it. Overall, this experience has been incredibly frustrating - I now feel like I need a self-help book just to calm my nerves, but it will not be one promoted by them!

Horrible platform. Lots of issues with billing and actually accessing publications. Can't see anything to actually cancel it. Support is AI, no actual human help, and sends you to the publication author. No response there either. I've genuinely spent 3 weeks trying to get this resolved. Time to just dispute it with the credit card company if no one will help. Maybe if enough people do that, they will figure it out.

Couldn't have asked for better service.

cancellation is almost impossible because they send you down one rabbit hole after another. you can't cancel on the app and the website is unresponsive I had to contact an AI chat that got the job done

It is as if Substack makes it difficult on purpose to move your text to another platform or to even just save it to a doc file. For one, I can not export my notes, I can try to export via saving the html of my "notes" page but then all the text hidden behind the "see more" button is left behind. I tried to work around this issue by using Tampermonkey and CSS scrips and alas I could not. This platform looks nice, that is why I was drawn to it in the first place, the UI is cool. BUT I WANT TO EXPORT MY DATA EASILY and that includes my fricking notes! P.S. GPT said: "You’re getting kicked to a single-note permalink because Substack treats /notes on publication subdomains differently (and often funnels you into a canonical “single note” page). That makes bulk capture painful." I was able to finally get around this issue with the help of GPT. This is how you are able to claim all your notes: YOU press f12 and RUN this script in "console" : (() => { const LABEL = /^(see|show)\s+more$/i; const els = [...document.querySelectorAll('a,button,span,div')].filter( el => el.offsetParent && LABEL.test((el.textContent||'').trim()) ); els.forEach(el => { const stopNav = e => e.preventDefault(); el.addEventListener('click', stopNav, { capture: true, once: true }); el.dispatchEvent(new MouseEvent('click', { bubbles:true, cancelable:true, view:window })); }); })(); Then you can scroll down to the bottom of the "notes" page with all the text hidden behind "see more" expanded. Subsequently, you press ctrl p or whatever it is to open print dialogue and then you save it as PDF, then you can convert it to doc.

Charged me money even when I cancelled

So I pay a lifetime subscription, and the account gets blocked for violating policies, so of course, no service whatsoever! I get a refund after dealing with their tedious bot, and get an email from a human agent, who helps me and issues the refund. Two days later after receiving the refund, they charge me again! How?! If I stated that there's no service and that the profile was a fraud. Now I can't get in touch with a human agent again due to their nonworking bot. Never ever use Substack.

More spam, also reported to the ICO