You cannot take your followers with you.

You can reach people inside a platform: a post, a Story, a direct message, a broadcast channel, a notification. Every one of those is carried by the platform, delivered at its discretion, and gone with the account. An email address is different: it is information you hold, not a permission somebody grants.

What the platforms themselves say

They can end the account

TikTok reserves the right, "at any time and without prior notice, to ban or suspend your account, or restrict your access to features of the Platform, at our sole discretion".1 X's US terms list reasons it may terminate an account, then add that it may also do so "for any other reason or no reason at our convenience".2 Instagram can "refuse to provide or stop providing all or part of the Service" to protect its community or services, or if you create risk or legal exposure for it.3

YouTube is the most constrained of the four: it commits to enumerated grounds and to telling you why.4

They do not promise you reach

X reserves the right to "remove or refuse to distribute any Content on the Services, limit distribution or visibility of any Content on the service, suspend or terminate users, and reclaim usernames without liability to you".2 YouTube's partner earnings page, on the money: "There are no guarantees under the YouTube partner agreement about how much or whether you'll be paid."5

These are the normal terms of a free service.

They can end a payout programme

Instagram's bonuses documentation says bonuses are offered "by invitation only for a limited time", and "as we test and learn, we may end bonus programmes".6

TikTok announced that its Creativity Program would "fully replace the Creator Fund" from 16 December 2023 in the US, UK, France and Germany.7 That replacement has itself since been replaced: TikTok's current documentation describes only the Creator Rewards Program.8 Two changes in about three years.

What a data export actually contains

X's help page lists what the archive contains: "your profile information, your posts, your Direct Messages, your Moments, your media, a list of your followers, a list of accounts that you are following, your address book".9 A list of your followers is a list of accounts. "Your address book" is the phone contacts you uploaded yourself. Neither lets you contact the people who follow you.

TikTok's data export "may include but is not limited to your username, watch video history, comment history and privacy settings", and "some data may not be available to download, such as data that affects the privacy of others".10 Its terms forbid the workaround: you may not "scrape, crawl, export or otherwise extract any data or content in any form, for any purpose, from the Platform using any automated system or software".10

Meta's Instagram export is framed throughout as your own information.11 Instagram's insights are aggregate demographics only, with a floor of 100 accounts before Meta will show them.12 The API agrees: the Instagram user object exposes a followers_count and no edge that returns a follower list, with no contact fields at all.13 YouTube's subscription resource exposes a title, a description, a channel ID and a thumbnail. No email field.14

Three caveats

• Lead ads are different. If somebody fills in a Meta lead-ad form with their email address, you can download it, for 90 days. The default export columns are campaign metadata with no email column at all: an address appears only because that person typed it into a form.15 Those people volunteered. They are not your followers.
• "Your address book" in an X archive is contacts you uploaded, not contacts you gained.
• Data portability transfers under EU and UK law move your own posts, profile and messages to another service. Not your audience's contact details.

What an email address is worth

An email address does not guarantee attention. People ignore email, filters exist, and a list you never write to decays. What it removes is the intermediary: nobody ranks your message and nobody suspends it. If you leave the platform, the list comes with you, because it is a file.

How a follower becomes an email address

Two moments, and both require the person to choose.

They sign up on your page

Someone taps your link and types their email address into a form on your page. We store it with a timestamped consent record: when they agreed, what they were told, and which tracked link they arrived on. That last field tells you which post produced subscribers rather than traffic.

They pay, and then opt in

The receipt after a payment carries a link the reader has to click, under a line saying plainly that they are not subscribed and this is optional. The payment is charged on your own Stripe account. We take 0%.*

* Stripe's card fee still applies.

A link rather than a checkbox is deliberate. A pre-ticked box on a receipt would make it marketing, which needs explicit consent. So there is nothing to untick: clicking the link is the consent. If the payer is already on your list, the section does not appear.

We do not send your newsletter

No campaigns, no broadcasts, no templates. We collect email addresses and consent records and export them as a CSV. You take that file to Mailchimp, ConvertKit, Beehiiv, Buttondown or whatever you already use, and send from there.

That is a limitation. Sending well is a separate craft — deliverability, list warming, bounce handling, spam complaints — and doing it badly would hurt you more than not doing it.

The free plan

What to do this week

1. Find out whether your link is even clickable. On several platforms, in several placements, it is not. The matrix is here.
2. Give each placement its own tracked link. Not one per platform: one per place. A YouTube description and a YouTube pinned comment are different placements and behave differently.
3. Ask for the email address before you ask for money. Most people who will eventually pay you will not pay today.
4. Export the file every month, whether or not you are sending anything yet.

Points one to three are true whatever you use.