That you own your mailing list and can export it at any time gives you the ultimate independence from the app. The app brings you growth (it is the number one source of revenue growth for writers on Substack), but you don’t have to opt into it, nor do any readers.

The app is there if you want it, but we can’t force you into it, or keep you there. The only way we can get people to use the app is if they believe that it’s helpful and good.

If your difference is more philosophical—that Substack should never even have built a network that provides an option for discovery independent of all the other discovery platforms that run on ads—then that’s fine, too. You still own your mailing list, your content, and even your payment relationships. You have the power to take all that with you and build somewhere else any time. If you do that, you still have to figure out how to grow your audience—but perhaps you wouldn’t do that via the Substack network. You could do it instead via X, LinkedIn, Instagram, and all the other places that aren’t the Substack app.