I got home last night from Chicago (via New York) and got a shock as I settled in bed to read Joyce Vance’s latest newsletter.
There, in an email sitting below Vance’s take on the Hunter Biden plea deal, was a payout notice for a monthly subscriber. Subscriptions are $7 a month, and since starting this Substack in early 2022, I have been used to the emails announcing that a payment of $5.57 (or some multiple thereof) was being delivered to my account.
Go ahead, do the math. I certainly did when I first saw it. Twenty percent of the monthly payment goes to credit fees.
But last night, I did a double take. The number was different. $5.80 is going into my account. Twenty-three cents more.
Twenty-three whole cents! Something had changed. If you are reading this, you know I had to investigate.
So I looked at the detail of the new payment, and the payment that had come in the day before. Both receipts listed $1.20 in Stripe Charges. But only the older one also listed $.23 in Stripe Fees.
Fees.
Or, as President Biden notes in this clip I swiped from PBS in the State of the Union:
I cannot express how happy I was to see that extra 23 cents per transaction. Yes, Stripe is still taking 17 percent of my revenue, but it’s the tangibility of it that impresses me. A political leader promised something. And just a few months later, that promise was fulfilled in a way I could see and understand.
It almost gives me hope.
And that is my message for today.
Except I’d like to see a lot more of those $5.80 payments. I’d like to have so many payments coming in that my fee percentage is lower. Maybe 15 percent! (Yes, our leaders still have work to do.)
So please, hit the button below and help me revel in the power of careful regulatory choices.
Or, if you’d like to support my work outside of the $7 or $70 options on Substack, you can hit me up on Ko-Fi, which seems to have a better deal with Stripe - meaning I get to keep more.
Subscribe via KO-FI
On Ko-Fi, you can pay any amount you want on a one-time or ongoing basis.
And if any of that is too much, please keep reading, and share these columns.