I have now matched all paid subscriptions to payments. It was a time-consuming process because a “customer” at Stripe is often a different name of a “Subscriber” at Substack. Trying to work through 400 is not quite a needle in a haystack, but it takes time. One payment never did match with any subscription; however, I can easily rectify that.

The support I received from Substack was next to zero, and the answer they gave to why subscribers received a “terminated service” email was not correct. If I pause payments because I’m not pleased with the quality of a publication that I’m being paid for does not even in the Substack documentation mean that a “terminated service” email would or should be sent, which happened and was upsetting to the recipients, and to me. The Substack Zendesk explained that a paused billing means a “cancellation.” This is an example of the nonsense I have received while trying to get to the bottom of these problems.

The initial problem I encountered with Substack spam continues, and the solution they recommend is to either spend my time blocking these senders from Substack who are not my subscribers, or block everybody, neither of which is going to happen because I will be departing Substack as soon as I am satisfied the new platform is working properly.