Substack Reviews & Complaints

Company Information

Legal name

Substack Inc.

Business type

Newsletter and subscription publishing platform operated by Substack Inc. of San Francisco, California, where independent creators publish and charge readers for paid subscriptions

Website

substack.comSource: Substack About page, checked 2026-10-20

Headquarters

San Francisco, CASource: BBB-listed address for Substack Inc., 548 Market St, San Francisco, CA 94104-5401, checked 2026-10-20

Independent Sources

Shown for context — not merged with USAComplaints' own numbers.

Reviews & Complaints on USAComplaints

1 complaint on USAComplaints, including 1 published in the last three years.

• Publication Suspended Without Proof and Support Cannot EscalatePublished Oct 26, 2026 · Recent consumer allegation

Contacts

• Official websitesubstack.com ↗

Customer service & general contact

• Help Center: how to contact Supportsupport.substack.com/hc/en-us/articles/43904995… ↗

Cancel, billing & returns

• Help Center: cancel a paid subscriptionsupport.substack.com/hc/en-us/articles/36003748… ↗
• Help Center: refund policysupport.substack.com/hc/en-us/articles/89159926… ↗

Locations

• Headquarters548 Market St San Francisco CA 94104

Substack complaints: cancel, refund and support routes

Checked on 2026-10-20 from Substack's own Help Center. Substack's Terms of Use say the creator, not Substack, is the seller of a paid subscription, so billing questions can involve both the publication and Substack Support. Keep the receipt email, the publication name and the date of the charge.

• Cancel. The Help Center says to go to substack.com/settings, select the publication under Subscriptions, open the Manage subscription page, use the link next to "To cancel your paid subscription, click here", then click Cancel subscription and choose a reason. For subscriptions bought in the Substack iOS app it says to cancel through the Apple App Store.
• What cancelling does. The same article says you keep paid access until the end of the period you paid for and will not be charged again, and states that "Cancelling doesn't give a refund." It says: "Free trials that end within 10 days end as soon as you cancel." and "Past-due, gift, and comped subscriptions end immediately." The cancellation flow ends with a Continue to cancel step: some publications show a free-month offer first, and the article says to click Continue to cancel to keep cancelling. Using the "end your subscription immediately" link ends access today, and "Past charges aren't refunded." The pause option (1, 3 or 6 months) is limited: "You can only pause a subscription once every 6 months."
• Refunds. The Refund Policy article says refunds are ultimately at the publisher's discretion and requests should go to the publisher first. It says Substack will issue a refund if a request is submitted to Substack within 7 days of payment, unless a subscriber perk has been claimed or the publisher marked the subscription non-refundable, and quotes these limits: "Requests submitted more than 7 days from the payment date will be left to the publisher's discretion. If one subscriber has submitted more than 3 refund requests, further requests may also be left to the publisher's discretion." A refund is also described for a dormant publication (inactive for "at least 6 months for yearly subscribers or at least 1 month (from the date of payment) for monthly subscribers"), and Substack "may issue a refund for payment processing errors, such as duplicate charges", which must have been made under the same account at the same time; "Charges made under different email addresses will be left to the creator’s discretion." Refunds may take up to 10 business days to appear, and iOS in-app subscriptions are refunded at Apple's discretion.
• Contacting Substack. The Support article says to sign in, start with the Support chatbot (which it says resolves about 90 percent of issues), and that if the bot cannot answer it creates an email ticket for the human Support team. It lists expected response times of within 24 hours for paid creators and 'prioritized based on urgency' for subscribers and general inquiries.
• Chatbot limits and written contact. The Terms say the support chat "cannot speak for Substack, modify our terms or policies, or make any binding promises to you" and that chats are provided with a third-party service provider, Decagon.ai. The Terms give [email protected] for questions about the Terms and for appeals of removed content or restricted accounts ("We will review your appeal and respond within 3 business days").
• Tax changes. The Terms say: "Beginning December 1, 2026, local VAT, GST, sales or use tax may be added to the purchase price for Paid Subscriptions on Substack." Charges may therefore differ from the listed price from that date.
• Outside complaints. You can file a complaint with BBB through its profile for Substack Inc. (see the complaint record below). For a card charge you do not recognise, your card issuer's dispute process is a separate route; check your issuer's deadlines.

Complaint record: BBB and Trustpilot as displayed on 2026-10-20

These figures are shown separately because they come from different sources and are not added together. They are unverified consumer submissions displayed by each site, not findings about Substack.

• BBB. BBB's profile for Substack Inc., San Francisco, shows a BBB Rating of F and says the business is not BBB Accredited. Under reasons for the rating, BBB lists "Failure to respond to 66 complaint(s) filed against business" and 70 complaints filed against the business. The complaints tab shows "70 complaints in the last 3 years. 23 complaints in the last 12 months." BBB notes the complaint text displayed may not represent all complaints. BBB's customer reviews tab separately shows "1.15 /5 stars" and "Average of 13 Customer Reviews". We did not read the individual complaints, reviews or any business responses in full, so we draw no conclusion about their content.
• Trustpilot. Trustpilot's page for substack.com shows 1.4 from 182 reviews, an unclaimed profile, and the statement that it does not fact-check reviews. Trustpilot's AI-generated summary of 74 recent reviews describes complaints about customer service, unexpected charges and difficulty cancelling; this is Trustpilot's summary, not our finding.
• Data breach listing. Have I Been Pwned says: "In October 2025, the publishing platform Substack suffered a data breach that was subsequently circulated more widely in February 2026. The breach exposed 663k account holder records containing email addresses along with publicly visible profile information from Substack accounts, such as publication names and bios. A subset of records also included phone numbers." It lists the breach as occurred October 2025 and added to its database on 6 Feb 2026. We did not find Substack's own notice about this incident, so the company's account and the scope of data affected are unverified here; readers can check an address on the Have I Been Pwned Substack page.

Substack's own account of these topics is in the support routes section above. We hold no archive complaints about Substack on usacomplaints.com at the time of writing.

Who runs Substack

Substack's Terms of Use (last updated October 6, 2026) describe themselves as "a binding contract between you and Substack Inc." BBB lists Substack Inc. at 548 Market St, San Francisco, California, in the category News Services, with a BBB file opened on 2023-08-04 and a business start date of 2010-04-27 (BBB raw page data, read 2026-10-20). The company's About page says Substack is "free to start and free to leave", that creators keep 90 percent and that the platform has "5 million paid subscriptions and counting" (the company's own statements, not independently checked).

The Terms say all Creators "are independent content creators and offer their subscriptions directly to Readers" and that Substack is not a party to the agreement between a Creator and a Reader. They also say disputes with Substack are settled by arbitration in San Francisco County, California, under JAMS Streamlined Arbitration Rules; the Terms contain no opt-out clause in the arbitration section we read on 2026-10-20. The same section says "all claims against the other can only be brought in an individual capacity, and not as a plaintiff or class member in any purported class, consolidated, or other representative proceeding", allows court actions "for injunctive or other equitable relief pending a final decision by the arbitrator", and says "The prevailing party in any action or proceeding arising out of these Terms will be entitled to an award of costs and attorneys’ fees." The Terms also limit liability to "the greater of (1) $100 or (2) the amounts paid and/or payable by you to us in connection with Substack in the twelve-month period preceding the applicable claim". Read the full Terms before relying on this summary.

Frequently Asked Questions