This relaunch showcases a model that, in the years ahead, will give big-vision publishers a new option for starting a fully-fledged media business, encompassing rich design, advanced websites, deep analytics, automated marketing features, and first-class support for video, audio, and more.

Substack will always be dedicated to helping individuals and small teams publish across formats, build an audience, and make money from subscriptions, but we also want to support publishers’ ambitions as they grow on the platform. With that in mind, we are building a toolset that will allow high-volume publishers with sophisticated needs—including custom branding, website design, and support for large editorial teams—to take advantage of Substack’s best-in-class publishing system while also being plugged into a network that drives subscriptions.

We’re partnering with The Free Press to build this first version of Substack’s enterprise offering while we learn how to best support organizations of this nature. This work will benefit all publishers on the platform. As we develop the toolset through an extended private beta over the coming year, we plan to take features designed for The Free Press and make them available for general use in Substack.

The Free Press in its current iteration launched on Substack in 2022 and has since accrued an audience of 1 million subscribers, including more than 135,000 paid subscribers. A recent funding round valued the company, which now has 50 employees, at $100 million.

We view The Free Press as an ideal partner for this initiative because of its longstanding presence on Substack, which extends back to its founding in early 2021, and because of its commitment to pursuing high-integrity journalism. The Free Press is old school in the best way, with meticulous editorial standards that it upholds through in-depth reporting, fact-checking, editing, original photography, and more. The Free Press, like Substack, is also dedicated to a business model based on subscriptions.

“The Free Press and Substack have grown up together,” says

We’re excited by the potential of matching these advanced content management tools with the power of Substack’s network effects, anchored by audience-sharing features such as recommendations and the Substack app. For publications across the platform, the Substack app now drives 50% of all subscriptions and 30% of paid subscriptions.

We anticipate many more outlets like The Free Press to be built on Substack in the future, benefiting not only from the elegance and simplicity of the platform’s publishing tools, but also by being part of an ecosystem of intelligent readers and consumers who are hungry for quality media.