A step-by-step guide to building a Substack-like newsletter subscription feature using Astro, Netlify (or Vercel) serverless functions, and Google Sheets as a free database. Covers the author profile subscribe form, a scroll-triggered popup dialog with overlay animation, toast notifications, cross-component communication via localStorage and custom events, and a Google Apps Script web app to store emails. The entire setup costs nothing and took about 3 hours to implement.
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