Three newsletters for the price of 1.5: Independent journalists experiment with a bundle

One of the problems with the recent boom in personal newsletters is that subscription prices add up. Many of them go for somewhere between $5 and $10 per month, with a discount for yearly subscriptions, and supporting your favorite writers gets expensive quickly: One person told The New York Times last year that she paid about $600 annually for 11 newsletter subscriptions; another had annual subscription costs of $3,000.

That’s an amount that few people are willing to pay. There are some initiatives that do things differently, like the publication Flaming Hydra, which has 65 contributing members — and looks more and more like a magazine, complete with print editions for top-tier subscribers — and the app Noosphere, which Hanaa’ wrote about last year. But the true holy grail of newsletters, the thing that would give readers the closest thing to a bespoke magazine without making them pay full price for a bunch of individual subscriptions, is the bundle.

“Whoever figures out a way to bundle independent journalism subscriptions will be a hero,” independent journalist Marisa Kabas, author of The Handbasket, wrote on Bluesky in February.

Last week, Kabas followed up with an announcement. “Exciting news,” she wrote. “We’ve finally found a way to do a paid indie media bundle so you don’t have to separately subscribe to so many newsletters.”

Kabas had teamed up with Katelyn Burns, author of Burns Notice, and Kat Tenbarge, author of Spitfire News, to offer a 30-day bundle of all three newsletters, allowing readers to access them with a one-time $8.50 transaction — half the price of paying for all three individually.

The idea had been percolating for a while. A few months earlier, Kabas had heard from Michaël Jarjour, an ex-Twitter partner manager and co-founder of Trustfnd, a new service that allows independent journalists to create newsletter bundles and tap into each other’s audience bases. “I wasn’t able to give the idea much energy while I focused on my work and business,” Kabas told me in an email, but it was certainly something she was interested in. The discussion was revived in February, when Burns told her she’d been talking to Jarjour about launching the first paid subscription bundle. Burns, Kabas told me, was “foundational to making this happen.”

Trustfnd (pronounced “trust fund”) solved a key technical problem for Kabas, Burns, and Tenbarge: Their publishing platforms (The Handbasket and Spitfire News are on Beehiiv, and Burns Notice is powered by Ghost) don’t have a built-in way to create a bundle of any sort, whether cross-platform or on a single platform. This is true across newsletter services; Substack and Patreon also do not offer bundles.

This is partly by design. “We’ve always talked about doing this, but it gets pretty messy and complicated if the entities in the bundle aren’t actually a part of the same company,” Tyler Denk, CEO of Beehiiv, told me in an email. He outlined some potential concerns:

• What if person A drives 10x more signups than person B and person C, do they all split evenly?
• What if person C decides they no longer want to be a part of the bundle, do they take those subscriptions with them? If so, what price do they pay?
• If a reader subscribes to the bundle but primarily engages with only one newsletter, who “owns” that subscriber for purposes of future direct communication, re-engagement campaigns, or list sales?
• What if person C grows dramatically mid-bundle and wants to reprice their standalone? They’re now locked into a bundle price that undervalues them.
• What if one newsletter in the bundle publishes something controversial that creates reputational blowback for the others?

“There’s a bunch of other complications, but the concept itself I think is interesting,” he said. “It’s worth thinking on a bit more, but I do think a lot of these people are going to run into future issues with the bundle.”

Trustfnd works by tapping into Ghost and Beehiiv’s APIs. Independent journalists connect their newsletters to their Trustfnd accounts, and then connect their Trustfnd account with the accounts of whomever they want to team up with for a bundle. “It’s like a network effect as a service,” Jarjour told me over email. “We want them to stay independent entities but move like one when it comes to growing their owned audience.”

Bundling, Jarjour told me, allows newsletters to grow faster and more cheaply because each newsletter can tap into a shared audience funnel; readers who subscribe to The Handbasket, for example, will now be exposed to Burns Notice and Spitfire News. (Existing subscribers of each newsletter also get discounts on the bundle, adjusted according to which newsletter — each of which has a different individual subscription price — they subscribe to.)

“Turning followers (you rent) into subscribers (you own) is a collective challenge for journalism,” Jarjour wrote. “That’s why I felt the solution needs to have a collaborative element as well.”

And, he said, “I had some money on the side because I got fired from a fancy tech job by a lunatic who hates journalism [Jarjour left Twitter in February 2023, five months after Elon Musk took over]. So I wanted to build something I believe will make journalism stronger against even its worst enemies.”

Ghost and Beehiiv are the only platforms that currently support paid bundles — Trustfnd currently offers 30-, 60-, or 90-day bundles, and the Kabas/Burns/Tenbarge bundle is currently just for the first month, although Kabas said she would “definitely be supportive of a year-long trial.” Ghost and Beehiiv were easy to integrate with because they are open platforms, but Jarjour said he and his cofounder, René Pfitzner, who was previously the CEO of an ecommerce platform, are starting talks with closed platforms (such as Substack and Patreon) to integrate with them as well.

Trustfnd is currently in beta, and free for journalists to use, but plans to charge a fee (which they are currently trying to figure out) rather than take a cut of revenue. In the near term, Jarjour said he hopes to grow Trustfnd by building out bundles and creating a service for “legacy brands to get in on the action by building networks of independent journalists around their brands.”

“Our longer term vision is to enable independent entities to move like one when that is useful,” He continued. “So they can grow, earn, and spend money together. Like a new kind of news organization.”