Substack has introduced new monetization features, community tools, podcast improvements, and AI-powered analytics support aimed at helping creators grow their audiences.
Paid Subscriber Perks
One of the biggest additions is Paid Subscriber Perks, which lets creators offer benefits beyond paywalled articles and podcasts. Publishers can now share discount codes, downloadable resources, invitations to live events, and other exclusive offers through a new Perks tab on their publication page. The feature is available to creators who have Substack payments enabled.
Notes
Beyond monetization, users on iOS and Android can now save Notes directly within the Substack app. Saved Notes are stored in a dedicated section of a user’s profile, making it easier to revisit useful recommendations, discussions, and posts without searching through feeds.
Community engagement has also been expanded. Creators can now schedule Chat discussions in advance, similar to scheduling newsletters or Notes, making it easier to plan regular conversations with subscribers. In addition, polls can now be added directly to Notes as well as regular posts, giving publishers a simple way to gather opinions, feedback, and ideas from their audience.
Substack has also improved its writing editor with new formatting tools. These include superscript for footnotes, exponents and trademark symbols, subscript for scientific and mathematical notation, and text colours and highlighting to help emphasize important content.
Podcast and Video Improvements
The podcast experience has also received several improvements. Listeners can now adjust playback speed directly from the player, download episodes for offline listening, and use a sleep timer for better playback control. Meanwhile, creators hosting podcasts outside Substack can now distribute their existing RSS feeds to the platform, including podcasts that use dynamic advertising.
For podcasters, Substack has also added support for tracking prefixes, allowing creators to integrate third-party podcast analytics tools and obtain more accurate download statistics across different listening platforms.
Video publishing has also been streamlined with a unified settings page that brings together podcast controls, free previews, video clipping, transcripts, and automatic YouTube publishing. The clipping tool has also been redesigned with full-screen editing and improved caption controls.
Support for Model Context Protocol
One of the most notable additions is support for Model Context Protocol (MCP). The feature allows compatible AI assistants such as Claude and ChatGPT to securely access publication analytics, helping eligible creators better understand subscriber growth, engagement trends, and overall publication performance without manually reviewing dashboards. MCP support is currently available for Substack Bestsellers.
