In just a few years, Chill Subs has gone from a beer?sparked idea to one of the most unexpectedly essential tools in the lit?mag world. What began as a scrappy project built in a tiny village in Georgia has grown into a platform tens of thousands of writers use to make sense of the submission process. Their free tracker, thoughtful data tools, and steady stream of updates all point to the same thing: making the writing life a little easier, a little clearer, and a lot more fun.

And because timing is everything in the writing world: they’re currently offering 50% off memberships, but only for a couple of more hours. If you’ve been curious about their paid features, now’s the moment to jump.

I talked with cofounder Benjamin Davis about how it all started, why they’ve kept the core tools free, and new features—from customizable tracking to data imports to a more nuanced approach to magazine ratings. What follows is a conversation about how Chill Subs is evolving to meet writers’ needs with clarity, creativity, and care.

HOPKINSON: Tell me a little bit about how Chill Subs got started. 

DAVIS: Oo, OK. Fast version: My cofounder Karina had a beer in Poland when she came up with the idea. Ben (me) came on to help a couple months later, Nikita and Shel a couple months after that. Spent most of the early days in a small village called Mtskheta outside Tbilisi, Georgia (the country) arguing a lot, iterating a lot, and then arguing about what we iterated on. We’re like siblings with all the same baby. Oh god…or maybe not that. It was a fun project that became a business. Now we have roughly 20 coworkers all doing various things every day. We’ve got 80,000 users who seem happy with what we’re doing. It’s pretty wild how far it’s come and hope to see it go much further.

HOPKINSON: It’s amazing that your submission tracker is free! Can you tell us why you decided to offer that and how it works with your business model? 

DAVIS: The submission tracker was kind of the catalyst for our whole philosophy: give writers everything they need to succeed, then build cool stuff around it that they can pay for if they want to. To really succeed as a writer you have to submit a piece to 10, 20, 30+ magazines before it might find a home, a submission tracker is not optional. Tracking submissions also contributes to statistics that help the whole community stay more informed. Acceptance rate and response time data provide a lot of important context for folks submitting.

So an example of how we leverage all of that into paid features. We use the data to create insights on magazine listing pages. So you can see how a magazine compares to others in the writing world. We also use it to show similar magazines so if you like a magazine, at the bottom of each listing, there are recommendations. And we have our Submitter’s Passport connected to the tracker where you can save your submission information and literary bios to easily use them when submitting later.

HOPKINSON: Which new features are you most proud of or excited about? 

DAVIS: We have a lot of cool new things, but I can stick to the submission tracker for now. We have big-big plans to overhaul it later this year. But some of the latest updates to it have been around making it more friendly and easy to use. We also wanted to make it more of an individual experience. When we created it, we put all these little jokes into it like Rejection Bingo or silly phrases that pop up when you get a rejection. But now so many folks use it who maybe don’t want that kind of experience. So we made it more customizable. I also love our Kanban board view. I think a lot of tech in the lit space doesn’t consider giving folks a more fun/pleasurable experience. There is no reason for a Kanban board except that it’s more fun to use than a table. That’s a lot of how we think of the tracker. Tracking can be really boring. So how can we make it more enjoyable? Also, our “Pieces” functionality is just starting. So it’ll save any pieces you add internally but when we revamp the tracker those will have their own space.

HOPKINSON: Can you tell us more about uploading submission history and how that works? 

DAVIS: We were way behind on stats compared to other platforms. So we had to get creative on boosting our numbers. That’s when we came up with the import history function. Folks can upload their entire submission history from Submittable to auto-populate their tracker. We also have an agreement with the Submission Grinder who helped us create functionality to easily upload any tracked submissions from there. And folks can use their own spreadsheets. The only place where folks can’t transfer data from is Duotrope due to their Terms of Service. If you just go to settings on the tracker, there is a pdf you can download that shows how to import everything and an option for each place. It’s pretty simple. And if you want to leave us, there is an easy export button as well. We also have an upload for editors to give us their entire submission history. So you can see pin-point accurate statistics. Like The Sun, for example, who participated in the data, uploaded over 40,000 submissions. And, well, you can go see their acceptance rate for yourself.

HOPKINSON: With all these recent improvements and new features, your crowdsourcing help to find any bugs or glitches with a perk. Can you tell us how we can help? 

DAVIS: We recently finished a big site migration, essentially rebuilt everything from the ground up, and we’re running a bug bounty campaign right now where anyone who finds and reports a bug gets a free month of membership (was a week but, eh, we’re giving a month). You can report bugs through this form or click “report a bug” in our support portal. Beyond that, the best way to support us is becoming a paid member or by signing up for Sub Club or Forever Workshop. We have two full-time data people and need a third, plus a new production designer. That just comes down to resources. It’s a long game, and more people become paid every day. Other than that, just using the website, sharing what you find, and telling your writer friends about us.

HOPKINSON: Is there anything exciting coming up you’d like to mention? 

DAVIS: I’m not sure if it will be released by the time this goes out, but will be very soon. Our new listings overview page will start incorporating commenting and red flags into our ratings system. We realized a while ago that what writers need more than statistics is qualitative information. Writers want to know more than just an acceptance rate (and they should). So we let writers recommend and rate magazines. Again, along with our model, commenting will be a paid feature to engage with. We’re both excited and nervous so this will be released as a beta. We made it so red flags are for everyone, and are restricted to obviously bad behaviors. And for comments, they are tied to a positive rating so they are there to add more context for writers, not lead to complaints or bashing this mag or that because of a rejected piece. It’s a tough balance. A lot of magazines are labors of love, most personal slights come down to miscommunication. So we’re trying to build a space where the bad actors are exposed (AI training, outrageous fees, rights grabs, etc.), and creative projects are supported on both the editor and writer side. We don’t have lots of resources for moderation and we don’t think we are the arbiters of truth, so we’re trying to build with care and intention.

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