Switching from Substack to Holder

This guide is shaped differently from the others, because Substack is not really a mail tool and Holder is not a publishing platform. Holder holds your people, your bookings and your sessions. It does not host an archive, a public publication page, or a paid-subscription product. So the honest first question is not how to export — it is whether this move is the right one.

Read this before you export anything

Three things Substack is holding that no export will release.

• Your archive and your address. The posts and the yourname.substack.com URL stay where they are. Everything you have ever linked to points at that address
• Recommendations. The cross-promotion network only works inside Substack. If a meaningful share of your list arrived that way, you are giving up your main source of new readers
• Paid subscriptions. Billing runs through Substack's own Stripe connection. Card details do not transfer, and there is no mechanism to hand the billing relationship to anyone else

If the newsletter is a way of staying in touch with a practice, Holder is a good home for the people and you keep writing wherever suits. If the newsletter is the practice, and paid subscriptions are the income, Holder is not a replacement and you'd be better looking at a publishing platform.

What comes with you

• Subscribers: yes. Email addresses, names, sign-up dates.
• Consent status: yes. Deactivated stays deactivated. Holder keeps a permanent suppression list and checks it at every send.
• Paid status: as a label only. Holder records who was paying you. It does not bill them, and the subscription does not continue.
• History: no. Opens, post views and comments stay with Substack.

Export from Substack

• Go to your Subscribers page
• Click the three dots above the subscriber list and select Export
• Choose All columns, not visible columns only
• You get: email, name, active or deactivated status, whether they're paid, sign-up date, and the expiry date on paid subscriptions

Also take the full publication export from Settings > Exports while you're there. It includes your posts. You will not want to rewrite them from the web archive in two years.

If you have paid subscribers

Do this before you touch anything else, and do it personally.

• Write to each of them by name. If there are more than you can face writing to individually, that is a sign the paid tier is a real business and worth pausing over
• Decide what happens: wind the paid tier down with proper notice, or leave Substack running in paid-only mode while the rest of your work moves
• Whichever you choose, cancel the subscriptions yourself rather than letting them lapse into a service you have stopped writing for

Import to Holder

• Upload the subscriber CSV as it downloaded. Date formats are normalised on import
• Read the column mapping check, and map the status column deliberately — that's your consent
• Map the paid column too. It arrives as a tag, so you can see at a glance who supported you
• Duplicates are flagged side by side; the more restrictive opt-out wins

What Holder rebuilds rather than imports

• Sign-up forms and sequences
• Booking pages, session types, availability and packs, which Substack never had
• Under an hour for a working sign-up form and a welcome sequence

The last step

• Leave the Substack page up with a post explaining where you have gone and a link. Do not delete it — every link anyone has ever shared points there
• Send a test to yourself
• Check that an address you know is deactivated in Substack is suppressed in Holder

Deep history imports are a paid one-off service, not part of a trial or a plan. If you want one, send us your export before you start a trial: we'll quote you for it, and tell you honestly what will and won't come with you either way.