What Submittable actually costs a small literary magazine

Let me start with the part that surprised me when I went to check.

Submittable does not publish a price for literary magazines. Go to their pricing page today and you get corporate social responsibility software, grant management, and an enterprise tier. Three buttons, all of which say Book a Meeting. There is not a number anywhere on the page, and there is not a literary magazine anywhere on it either.

The literary price lives somewhere else: in a help-centre article, written in January 2022, still up today. It is worth reading, and not only for the number.

"Literary journals were our first customers."

They were. That is the sentence that opens the article, and everything else follows from what it implies. The magazines came first, and the pricing page now sells to corporate foundations.

The published number

Here is the actual offer, as of today. Magazines that belong to the Community of Literary Magazines and Presses pay $39 a month, or $290 a year. Submittable calls that a 38% saving on regular pricing, which is a price they do not print.

The plan gives you unrestricted team seats and unrestricted paid and unpaid submissions, six projects, five form fields per form. Then, at the bottom, in a NOTE, comes the line that actually determines what you pay:

"There is a $.99 processing fee per transaction, plus a 5% charge per fee amount for paid submissions."

Two things about that $290 before we do any arithmetic. It is only available to CLMP members, and CLMP membership has its own annual dues. And it is the price for new customers, which is a category you belong to exactly once.

The fee is the price

Ninety-nine cents plus five percent sounds like rounding. Put it against a three-dollar reading fee and look at what it does.

A writer pays you $3. Submittable takes $0.99, plus 5% of the $3, which is $0.15. Total: $1.14. On a three-dollar fee, thirty-eight cents of every dollar goes to the platform before you have read a word.

Self-hosting does not make payment processing free, and any comparison that pretends otherwise is lying to you. You still have to take the money, and the money still costs something. So let us be exact about what.

PayPal publishes its rates, and for small payments there is a specific one. Micropayments pricing is 4.99% plus $0.09 for a domestic US transaction, against the standard 3.49% plus $0.49. Below about $27 a transaction, micropayments is the cheaper rate, which covers every reading fee and most contest entries a literary magazine will ever charge.

So the same three-dollar fee, taken straight into your own PayPal account, costs 4.99% of $3, which is $0.15, plus $0.09. Total: $0.24.

Nine hundred dollars. On one reading period. Before the subscription.

A whole year, for a magazine that does the normal things

Take a journal that reads for a fee and also runs one contest. A thousand submissions at $3, and five hundred contest entries at $15. That is a fairly ordinary year for a small magazine with a pulse.

Contest entry of $15: Submittable takes $0.99 plus 5% of $15, which is $0.75. That is $1.74 a head. Your own PayPal at the micropayments rate takes $0.84.

The gap is $1,520 a year, and it is not an abstraction. At $25 a contributor, that is sixty poets you could have paid. At $250 a cover, that is six covers. For a magazine of this size it is very often the difference between paying writers and thanking them in the acknowledgements.

Where the money went in our case

I run eight journals. If they were all on a platform at the literary rate, that is $2,320 a year in subscriptions before a single writer pays a fee. The reading fees and contest entries on top of that would push it past four thousand.

Instead the software is free, the hosting is a shared plan, and the fees land in our own PayPal. The money that would have gone to a subscription goes into printing and into contributors. That is not a philosophy. It is subtraction.

The honest counter-arguments

There are real ones, and you should hear them from me rather than find them out in month two.

A hosted platform is somebody else's problem when it breaks at midnight. Self-hosting means the server is yours to keep up, and the backups are yours to remember. Writers already have accounts on the big platforms, and some of them like the convenience. And a paid platform puts your call for submissions in a discovery feed where writers browse, which is a genuine channel that you give up.

Weigh those honestly. Then weigh them against fifteen hundred dollars a year, forever, and the fact that when you stop paying, the record of everything your magazine ever read stops being yours to open. That second part is the one I would not trade.