Going live is several decisions, not one button
Substack’s help page describes live notifications and the option to paywall a live video so only paid subscribers can watch. That sentence hides four separate choices: who can watch, who is alerted, who can chat, and what you do with the recording afterward.
Creators often treat them as one setting and find out later that they were not. A stream open to everyone does not establish who receives an alert; host choices and recipient preferences still matter. A stream limited to paid subscribers can still produce a recording you have to decide what to do with.
This article offers a short check for those four choices. It is editorial synthesis built from Substack’s help pages, not a Substack feature, and it does not cover every setting the app offers.
Choose who can watch
The first choice is access. The help page lists three options: everyone, all subscribers, or paid subscribers only. Everyone lets any Substack user join and comment. All subscribers covers free and paid subscribers. Paid subscribers only covers monthly, annual, and founding member paid subscribers.
It adds that if you do not have payments enabled, you will not see the paid option. For first streams, Substack suggests going live to everyone or all subscribers, and paywalling once your audience is in the habit of joining.
Treat that as Substack’s suggestion, not a rule. Decide by what the stream is for. A public Q&A that brings in new readers fits a wider audience, and an event you want paid subscribers to feel they got something extra from may fit a narrower one.
Separate the alert from the audience
The second choice is who hears about it. The primary live guide describes email or push alerts and a reading-queue entry, but the desktop guide lets hosts choose whether to send an email notification, and recipient preferences govern live-video email and push alerts. Do not promise delivery to every subscriber. The primary guide recommends the app; confirm the current platform-specific join route and tell attendees how to use it rather than claiming app-only or universal browser viewing.
If you run more than one publication, the page says you can choose which publication sends the notification and whether it goes to subscribers or paid subscribers. It also says any new subscribers who join during the live video are added to the publication you selected, so check that choice before you start.
The page does not say how a notification choice interacts with the access choice in every combination. If your plan depends on a particular pairing, test it in a low-stakes stream first; do not assume a private-stream option.
Decide who can chat
The third choice is the conversation. The primary live guide describes the Allow live chats from setting for limiting chat to paid or founding subscribers. That guide also says a stream open to everyone lets any Substack user comment; the desktop guide separately confirms that hosts can customize chat access.
That matters if you plan to take questions. A chat open to everyone may bring more voices, and a narrower setting may keep the conversation to people who already follow you closely. Neither is better in general. Check the available permission combination in your own streaming setup; the guides do not establish every interaction between access and chat settings.
Substack’s page also describes a way to show only questions in chat, and says that feature is currently available only on web or desktop live streaming. If you plan to rely on it, check which way you intend to stream.
Plan the recording before you start
The fourth choice is what happens afterward. The help page says Substack automatically saves the recording as a draft post, which you can edit, paywall, clip, and publish like a video post. The video post guide says publishing settings let you choose which audience can view the post.
For a hypothetical example, imagine an independent educator who runs a monthly question session for paid subscribers. The live stream is limited to paid subscribers, and the educator checks the recording’s publishing audience separately. They can consider a paid post with a free preview rather than treating a free preview as its own audience category. Confirm the intended post settings before publication.
Regardless of how the draft is initialized, check the audience in the publish settings before you send it; do not infer either automatic inheritance or an automatic reset, and keep a clip or two in mind if you want to bring in new readers without giving away the whole session.
Know what you can measure, and what the pages leave open
Statistics have different scopes. While live, the guide describes a total viewer count and concurrent viewers on iOS. Recording statistics are separate: The help page says stats for unpublished live video recordings are not available, and that stats for a published recording combine data from the live video and the post. On iOS, it says podcast downloads and subscription sources are not included in those post stats.
You can learn from the live counts without publishing a recording. Publishing is required for the combined recording/post statistics described above; those are not a separate measure of live-only attention. If you want to know where subscribers came from, the page says that data is not in those post stats on iOS.
The pages also do not say how long recordings are kept, or how a paywalled live recording behaves in every case. Where a detail matters to you, check your own dashboard, which the page says shows scheduled, past, and cancelled live videos and recordings on the web.
Plan the stream with the rest of your publishing, and keep a record
Decide the four choices when you plan the stream, not on the screen before you go live. If you plan your content with a creator tool such as Launchvibes, add the audience, notification, chat setting, and recording plan to the idea. A stream with a clear purpose is easier to promote in advance, which Substack itself recommends.
Keep a short record for each stream: the audience you chose, the notification settings and any delivery you actually observed, the chat setting, what you did with the recording, and the date. Substack updates these pages, so a dated note shows what you relied on. The earlier articles on paid podcast feeds and audience-specific content cover related audience choices.
Check the help pages again before each new kind of stream, since features differ between the app and the web and Substack may change them. This article reflects the pages at the time of writing and is not a substitute for them.