Side hustle & income

AI Newsletter Income Calculator

Sponsors buy opens, not subscribers. This prices your slot from the opens you genuinely deliver and adds a paid tier on top.

SubscribersOpen rate — 42%NicheSends per month — 4Sponsor slots per send — 1Slots actually sold — 60%Under 5,000 subscribers most issues go unsold.Subscribers on a paid tier — 2%Paid tier price (USD/month)

Estimated monthly revenue

$985 – $2,045

Opens per send: 3,360
Niche CPM: $45 / 1,000 opens
Fair price per sponsor slot: $151
Sponsor revenue / month: $363
Paid tier revenue / month: $1,152
Annual (mid case): $18,179
Revenue per subscriber / yr: $2

Benchmark: a healthy newsletter earns $1–$3 per subscriber per year. Yours is at $2.

Pricing a sponsor slot without guessing

Quote on opens. Take your average opens, divide by a thousand and multiply by the CPM for your niche. A tech newsletter with 3,000 opens is a $135 slot, not a $500 one — and sponsors will check, because most ad networks report the same numbers.

Fill rate is where projections break. Selling every slot every week is a full sales job. Below roughly 5,000 subscribers, assume a fill rate under 30% unless you are in a high-CPM B2B or finance niche where a single advertiser will book a quarter in advance.

Paid tiers are modelled with a 10% haircut for payment processing and churn. Converting more than 5% of a free list to paid is rare and usually means the free issue is too thin.