Services & pricing
Everything we make, and what it costs.
Three rungs, in order: decide the position, build the publication around it, then keep it shipping. They're built to be climbed — the Audit makes the call, the System turns it into something real, and the Retainer is where it compounds. A publication that stops moving stops earning attention; the third rung is what keeps it moving.
Most start at the Audit, because it's cheaper to find out what's wrong than to guess. If your position is already settled and defended, start at the System. Prices below are in US dollars, at the founding rates — they climb as the studio fills.
At a glance
| Rung | Price | Billing | Delivery | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Authority Audit | $500 | One-time | 5–7 days | Finding out what’s actually wrong |
| Positioning System | $1,500 | One-time | 3 weeks | Building the thing properly, once |
| Growth Retainer | $850/mo | Monthly | Ongoing | Keeping it shipping without you |
The three rungs in detail
Rung 1
Where most people start
Authority Audit
$500 · One-time · 5–7 days
You've built real credibility elsewhere, and your publication isn't showing it. You want to know what's actually wrong before you spend money fixing the wrong thing.
What's inside
- Intake & data pull
- A kickoff form, then we gather your existing content, analytics and access before the teardown starts.
- The Positioning Verdict
- The one thing your name should own — decided, argued, and written down.
- A full Substack teardown
- What's working, what's quietly leaking trust, and what to cut, clean or rebuild.
- Audience & growth read
- Who's actually responding, where growth stalls, and what the signals mean.
- The Authority Scorecard
- Seven dimensions, 100 points — led by your single biggest leak and the one fix that moves it most.
- The Deep Read
- A CSV-based dig through subscribers, posts, growth sources, cohorts, retention, revenue and at-risk readers. The evidence under every judgement.
- The ranked blueprint
- 10–15 moves, ordered by impact, so you always know what to do next.
- A premium Notion write-up
- The audit itself: a polished page you can revisit and share.
- A 30-minute live walkthrough
- We talk it through, so you leave clear on the first moves.
The fee comes off the Positioning System if you upgrade within 30 days — so the audit costs you nothing if you climb.
Rung 2
The full build
Positioning System
$1,500 · One-time · 3 weeks
The position is settled — by us, or because you already knew it. Now the publication has to exist, look like itself, and be runnable by you.
What's inside
- Positioning & brand
- Positioning sentence, voice profile, editorial guidelines and a signature framework that belongs to you.
- Substack design & clean-up
- Setup or redesign, sections, About and Welcome pages, navigation, visual identity, and a tidy-up of old posts where it matters.
- Canva template kit + prompt pack
- Covers, post headers and note cards — plus prompts so you can make your own.
- Your command centre
- One place for the story bank, the 90-day calendar, drafts, published work, assets and results — with a focused This Week view.
- Analytics dashboard
- Subscriber growth, reads, engagement and strongest themes, with plain keep / watch / change signals.
- A 90-day calendar, seeded from what already worked
- 90 Notes written and scheduled across your editorial calendar, plus a topic, title and outline for every agreed long-form slot. Loading them into Substack’s own scheduler is separate — the calendar is yours to publish from at whatever rhythm suits.
- 2–3 collaborative build sessions
- Live working sessions where you shape the system with us, so it lands right the first time.
- Review, QA and a final walkthrough
- We hand over the running system, show it working, and leave you clear on the rhythm that keeps it alive.
New long-form drafting is separate, at $150 a piece.
Rung 3
Keeping it alive
Growth Retainer
$850/mo · Monthly · Ongoing
The system exists. You want it to keep moving without you carrying every week of it — and you'd rather write than manage a machine.
What's inside
- A monthly planning session
- Sixty minutes, plus our preparation and written direction afterwards, to set the month's priorities, themes and rhythm.
- 30 Notes a month
- Planned and written, against the agreed calendar.
- A designed asset batch
- The headers, covers, note cards and supporting graphics the calendar needs, batched once a month.
- A living editorial calendar
- Notes, long-form topics, hooks and engagement ideas — always current.
- Long-form support
- Angles, titles, outlines, hooks and editing direction for the long-form slots. You still write the essays.
- Growth & engagement analysis
- What's winning subscribers, what's stalling, and what to do about it.
- A monthly Authority re-score
- The same dimensions, re-run, so you can see the direction of travel.
- Automation & template upkeep
- Small improvements as the system gets used and worn in.
- Standing deadlines & async accountability
- So a week never disappears quietly.
- Warm intros & cross-promotion
- When there's a genuine fit across the Home Abroad network. A perk of being in the room, never a billed line.
The rate you start on is locked for 12 calendar months from the day you buy.
Add-ons
The pieces that take it further.
These are the things clients ask for most often — priced up front so it's a decision rather than a negotiation. Some sharpen the build, some take more off your plate. Add them at kickoff or a year in, and we'll tell you which ones we'd actually recommend for where you are.
Alongside a build
Business Command Space
$320A second workspace for the business around the publication: CRM, finances, SOPs, client delivery and dashboards. For when the Substack is one part of a larger operation.
First 90 Days Companion
$300Three 45-minute check-ins at weeks 2, 6 and 12 after launch. Each one comes with a light performance review beforehand, help choosing what to publish next, and written next steps after. Brief email support in between.
Publication Tune-Up
$250An async review of recent posts, structure, calendar, analytics and your whole control centre. Comments left directly in-system, the calendar adjusted, and a written verdict on what to keep, what to change, and the three moves that matter most. Best booked quarterly.
One post → one week engine
$240A workflow that turns a single strong idea into a week of supporting Notes, social posts and visual assets. We map it, build the template, run one real idea through it end to end, then train you to run it yourself every week.
Pinterest Top-of-Funnel Starter Kit
$220Pinterest as a front door to the publication: a full strategy with a cadence you can keep, the keywords your readers actually search, 8–10 named boards with search-friendly descriptions, a bio rewritten from those keywords, and 10 pin templates — five formats, two variants each — to publish from. Modelled on the Home Abroad Pinterest strategy, scaled to one account.
Audience Simulator
$200Trained on your real reader signals, so you can test headlines, angles and ideas against your actual audience before you publish rather than after.
Writer's Desk Session
$120A focused 45-minute working session on one specific question — an angle, a draft, a plan, a snag in the system — followed by a short written recap. Available as a package of three at a bundled rate.
DM Template Library
$50Ready-to-send messages for the moments that matter: a new free subscriber, a new paid one, a renewal, a reader going quiet. You send them yourself from Substack's own chat — no third-party tool, nothing to learn.
Alongside the retainer
Long-form drafting, in your voice
$150 / postFor when you'd rather the essays came off your plate too. We draft; you edit and publish under your own name.
Ongoing Pinterest management
$120 / monthOnce the Starter Kit exists, we run the account: pins scheduled and loaded from your content calendar, keyword performance watched and board descriptions refreshed when they stop pulling, and content gaps flagged for next month's queue. The Starter Kit has to be built first — there's nothing to run otherwise.
Subscriber DMs, done for you
$60 / monthWe prepare your segmented subscriber messages each month from the template library — welcome, paid thank-you, renewal, and re-engagement for quiet readers. You choose whether we send them or hand you the drafts.
Optional tools
Three tools we set up, and teach you to run
These are other people's products, not ours — so the subscription is yours, paid straight to the provider, and their prices are theirs to change. Setup, configuration and training sit inside your build at no extra studio fee, and we'll tell you which ones earn their keep for the way you actually work.
- Substack Pro Studio
- $47.50 — paid to the provider
- An optional third-party scheduling tool by Finn Tropy, for batching and managing Substack Notes. Account setup, schedule configuration, training and handover are included in your build at no extra studio fee. Continuing studio management is scoped separately.
- Substack Control Center
- $15 — paid to the provider
- An optional third-party dashboard showing subscriber growth, revenue and the activity driving results. Initial configuration and training are included. Custom reporting or continued studio management is scoped separately.
- StackContacts
- $12 — paid to the provider
- An optional third-party tool that combines subscriber data to flag likely paid conversions and churn risk. Initial data connection, configuration and training are included. Continued studio management is scoped separately.
How pricing works
No quotes, no surprises.
- Founding rates, while they last
- The prices on this page are founding rates, and they climb as the studio fills — the Audit to $650, the System to $2,100, the Retainer to $1,250/mo. Whatever rate you start on is the rate on your invoice.
- The audit credits upward
- Start with the Authority Audit and upgrade to the Positioning System within 30 days, and the audit fee comes off. Finding out what's wrong shouldn't cost you extra for being careful.
- Your retainer rate locks
- The monthly rate you start on is the rate you keep, for as long as you stay with us — regardless of what the retainer costs new clients later.
- Billing
- All prices on this page are in US dollars. One-time rungs are invoiced up front; the retainer is monthly, and you can stop it at the end of any month.
- Your system, on your platform
- We build command centres in Notion by default, because it's what we know best and what most people already have. If you'd rather live in Google Workspace — or anything else your team already runs on — we'll build it there instead. The platform is decided at kickoff and built once; moving it later is scoped separately.
Start anywhere
Not sure which rung is yours?
The Authority Scorecard reads your publication and tells you where it's leaking — free, and honest to a fault. Or just message us and we'll say plainly which rung we'd put you on, including when the answer is none of them.
Or write to atelier@homeabroadhq.com — a human answers.
