Everyone, I could really use your help. I have a problem with my Substack account, and I wonder if any of you have encountered this. I could really use any advice you might have.

I joined Substack a year ago, and I started subscribing to accounts with whom I felt a connection. In December, I hit a limit of 5,000 subscriptions that I hadn’t known existed. Above this, I received an error message of “Cannot subscribe to more than 5000 publications.”

So I rapidly started unsubscribing, and even though I now only have 2446 subscriptions, I’m still getting this error message. I’ve tried every diagnostic that the AI support has suggested, written Substack support and Substack Team many times over the past 4 months, I’ve tagged them in Notes and on LinkedIn, I’ve written emails to every support address I could find, as well as CEO Chris Best and COO Hamish McKenzie, all with zero response.

Sometimes now I can get one or two subscriptions in before I get the error message again. But then I’m blocked anew.

I don’t know what to do. My Substack account is for my work, and it means so much to me. I love this platform. I hate not being able to subscribe to and reciprocate subscriptions with people I feel a connection to. I don’t want to delete my account and start over. I’ve lost so much time with this. And with this being my work account that I use in tandem with by blog, my work is really suffering because I can’t connect with people as I’d like. I’ve since been following people instead of subscribing, but that feels disingenuous when I can’t connect with fellow Substackers as I’d love to do.

Can anyone please help? Have any of you encountered this? I feel so dumb for having subscribed to so many accounts so quickly as a newbie. I just love people! It makes me so angry to feel like I may have to delete my account and start over because Substack won’t reset my counter. I welcome any advice and help that you might give, and if you know someone in Substack administration who might listen, please feel free to share and restack. Thanks so much. ❤️