The Purse has a new look and a new website! We hope you like it!
It’s both exciting and terrifying to launch something new into the world. We’ve been working on this change for months. In August, I hired a designer, Elsa Ienna of Palette Studio, to help us give The Purse a fresh look. And then in October, Alicia and I decided we were ready to move The Purse onto a new platform.
In the hours and days and weeks since, there has been so much work going on behind the scenes. We worked with Elsa to perfect the designs. I wanted the look of The Purse to feel all at once fun, sophisticated, modern, messy, and fresh. I wanted the color palette to be bold and yet feminine. I wanted a logo that was both playful and professional. Elsa delivered everything I dreamed of and more.
Alicia and I have also spent so much time dreaming and planning for what the next phase of editorial will look like. From the earliest days of The Purse, I imagined this would be more than just a newsletter. (Not that there’s anything wrong with just being a newsletter.) I wanted a site where people could come every day and find fun and informative stories to read.
I realize that in the age of AI and social media it’s a bit old fashioned to have a website. Listen to the so-called experts, and you’ll begin to believe the internet is dead, reading is over, and all anyone wants are the AI-regurgitated snippets that Google coughs up when you type a query into the search engine. Or maybe you just want ChatGPT to give you an answer while it tells you you’re pretty? (I love when people tell me I'm pretty, so I get it.)
Perhaps we’re going out on a limb believing The Purse can be an exception—we’re bringing back websites like Gen Z made vinyl records popular again. I’m hopeful and confident at the same time. Alicia and I have been cooking up some ideas that I know loyal fans of The Purse are going to love. And thanks to you amazing readers, we’ve been steadily building a wonderful community of people who show up regularly to share their thoughts and opinions. We’re eager to continue to nurture that on our new site.
So what’s the same and what’s changed? Let me walk you through everything!
What’s new
Most obviously, our new design! Looks so good, right?
We also have a new url: thepurse.co! Fancy!
Less obviously, The Purse will no longer be hosted on Substack. Free and paid subscribers shouldn’t notice any big difference. Our friends at Ghost, our new email service provider, helped us move everything over from Substack and handled all the backend changes. We still use Stripe to process payments, so hopefully you won’t notice any disruption in service.
We have loved being part of a community of writers on Substack for the last two years, and so this move is a bit bittersweet. I truly believe that the friendships we’ve made are stronger than just sharing an email service provider, and Alicia and I plan to continue to hang out in Substack Notes and comment on our friends’ posts. Hopefully, you’ll see some of them contributing stories on The Purse as well!
More exciting than our new email service provider are all the amazing new editorial franchises we’ll be rolling out. Our goal with this new website is to start publishing daily while continuing to send out biweekly newsletters.
This week, we’re launching our newest franchise, Work History, detailing women’s salary and career trajectories. You can read the first one here, and you can submit your own entry here. We’re also (finally) rebooting our travel guides! It’s cold and snowy throughout much of the country, so I think you’ll enjoy being an armchair traveler to Hawaii.
We also want to hear more from you, our dear readers. Each Monday, we plan to pose a question to the community on all kinds of topics, from best advice on giving your kid an allowance to sharing our favorite personal finance books.
Another goal is more service journalism. Hang out in The Purse comment section long enough, and you’ll see readers asking great questions. We want to answer them! To start, Alicia has written a guide to surviving layoffs and advice on what to do if/when you inherit an IRA (coming on Thursday). Have a money or career question you want answered? Drop us a line at questions [at] thepurse [dot] co (not com).
Sadly, we were not able to port over the comments when we made the move. To comment on posts going forward, you will need to have a free Ghost account and log into the site. Hopefully, this shouldn’t be too much of a hassle for regular readers, but please let us know if you hit any bumps!
Another big change: We’re lowering the price of our annual subscriptions from $80 to $50. Ghost is a more cost-effective email service provider, and so we decided we wanted to make The Purse more affordable. If you were kind enough to sign up for an annual Purse subscription in December 2025 or January 2026, and you paid the full $80, I will comp you an additional year’s subscription. (And I’ll take care of this behind the scenes! You don’t need to reach out!)
Monthly subscriptions will continue to be $8 a month. We also have a “Founding Members” tier for $200 a year, which comes with a much-coveted Purse sweatshirt, as well as a chance to have coffee with me and Alicia if you live in (or are visiting) NYC.
What’s staying the same?
Change can be scary, but so many things about The Purse are staying the same!
We will still be sending our biweekly newsletters on Wednesdays and Fridays. The Wednesday send will include one of our signature franchises: Home Economics, Division of Labor, What It Cost Me, 30-Something, and Work History. On Fridays, we’ll send our weekly roundup with an essay from me or Alicia (and sometimes a special guest!) attempting to put the latest economic news in the context of our everyday lives.
Every story we published when we were on Substack has been moved over, so you can read all our amazing work on this new site. We have put more behind the paywall, but as we’re publishing five days a week, there is still so much for free subscribers to enjoy!
What else do you need to know?
Launching a new Purse website has been a total labor of love. Alicia and her husband, Chris Skinner, have helped in a million big and small ways, putting in so much overtime! My husband, Ken, continues to serve as our number one copy chief, reading all of the new work and answering dozens of minute style questions. He’s also put up with me being a total stress case for weeks. Elsa Ienna and her team at Palette Studio have crafted such a beautiful new look for us. And she put us in touch with Nadya Wasylko, the photographer who took our stunning new portraits. Don’t we look gorgeous?
The team at Ghost helped with the entire process of moving everything over from Substack and answered dozens of questions from me over the last few months. Our new site template was created by Bright Themes, and we worked closely with their team to customize the look and feel. Dan Oshinsky of Inbox Collective is responsible for introducing Alicia and me to the team at Ghost, and Lex Roman of Revenue Rulebreaker was a lifesaver answering 101 questions I had about making the move off of Substack.
Ghost didn’t compensate us to make the move. We’ve paid for everything—the design, the photography, and the template configuration—out of pocket. We also pay Ghost a fee to host our site, but unlike Substack, they don't take any piece of our reader revenue.
Greenlight, our launch sponsor, has helped us cover some of these costs. (And they are hosting our (re)launch party next week!) Truly, I've never been more excited to have a banner ad! But we couldn’t have made this big move without the support of paid subscribers. (I keep joking with Alicia that I’m going to start a LinkedIn series called “Confessions of a Middle Class Founder”—every step of this move was bootstrapped.)
It goes without saying that things are bound to go wrong in a big move like this. If you see something that seems out of place, if your subscription seems wonky, or if anything else is just off, please let us know! And give us some grace as we work out any kinks that arise!
It feels like a weird time to be celebrating a launch, as we watch in horror what’s happening in Minnesota, and as we worry about the future of our country. But I firmly believe that one of the best ways we can fight back is by understanding our country's economics and having full control of our personal finances. Our goal at The Purse is to empower women to feel confident managing their money and then use that money and knowledge to help others. Money is fucking powerful—let’s use ours to do some real good in the world.
In that vein, for the next month, we’ll be donating 10% of all new annual subscriptions to the Women's Foundation of Minnesota. And going forward, we’ll be regularly donating 5% of new paid subscriptions to a different charitable organization each month.
And thank you, dear readers, for your support! We’re so excited you’re here!
