SubstackReviews of substack.com

no photo id could be verifies I am 88 years old into the bargain and computer literate

The initial problem began the second I registered...emails..masses of them every day.My inbox groaned under the endless barage. When I unsubscribed..the emails continued.When I went to the website and unsubcribed, the emails continue. Today, another wall of emails....so I am joining the long queue of people who want out. If the emails stop, I will remove this bad review..I doubt if there's a human administering the bad reviews..too busy harassing and alienating their potential clients. You stop..I remove this review.

It’s simply a social media platform where there are no readers for engagement. It’s so focused on writers that honest talk feedback as engagement is nonexistent. The amount of work required to appease the babies on there was not worth it

Lacks basic features, analytics and now doesn't care about writers after launching a TV app. Won't suggest anyone to use Substack to start your newsletter

I had a very bad experience with this company. I unsubscribed from their newsletter, but I was still charged the following month anyway. This is already unacceptable, but what made it worse is that there is no real customer support. Their “support chat” is just an AI that keeps asking for more details without actually solving anything. When I request to speak to a real person, nothing happens at all no reply, no follow-up, no solution. It feels like they’ve set this up on purpose to block refunds and complaints.

I have been a loyal user for 4 years, but my recent renewal experience has been a nightmare. While the subscription page clearly lists the price as 70€, Substack is attempting to charge me 85€. To make matters worse, there is no option to cancel this pending renewal in my account settings. It has been trying to process this incorrect charge for 4 weeks straight. The automated support agent is useless and cannot resolve billing discrepancies. Extremely disappointed in the lack of transparency and human support.

Abysmal and utterly useless support. The chatbot's designed to just regurgitate specific lines and phrases. So no help at all trying to get a refund. Claim it can't find my email address, then it can't find the 'publisher' then it can't confirm that I've paid. All tosh, and no doubt designed to frustrate and ultimately and thwart the return of funds. I could not have imagined such a popular platform would be so dodgy when it comes to returning funds. More fool me.

Substack "customer support" is an oxymoron. One star is too generous. Either there is none - it's all AI -- or the fictional "team" is in a basement somewhere deliberately making subscribers' lives miserable. It's a disgrace. The two newsletters to which I subscribed and which were still charging me began telling me to "subscribe" for access. I got "previews" instead of full access. Again, I was already a fully paid- up subscriber. I went through dozens of iterations of "magic links" and codes, and was continually thrown back into the link-code-chat loop. The "chat" is a joke, and there is no human "team," as promised, if it doesn't work. Any employees being paid to support subscribers should be fired. The apparent irreversibility (and absence of human contact) of payment glitches that disadvantage subscribers is serious and remedied only by contacting your credit company. I blocked payment on my credit card and filed a dispute which was immediately resolved in my favor. A week later I did hear from a staffer at one of the newsletters --having sent them an email about Substack customer support hell. He apologized and was going to take it up with none other than customer support to resolve asap. The mention of customer support gave me a bad feeling. I've heard nothing since. And if it's up to customer support, I never will. (Update: after the well-intentioned newsletter staffer said he would get the matter to "support" to fix the problem asap, the only development has been a vindictive lock symbol on the newsletter. That's "support's" response.) This occurred during December, 2025- beginning of January, 2026.