“I can’t leave Substack, the alternatives charge monthly fees!”
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“I can’t leave Substack, the alternatives charge monthly fees!”
For a mid-sized paid newsletter, you will pay:
Ghost Pro: $149–$269/month
Beehiiv: $131–$218/month
Buttondown: $239/month
Mailchimp: $285/month
Substack: $700/month -
(this is based on assumptions of 20,000 members, 7% paid at $5/mo. twiddle the math as you see fit)
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Cheapest option is self-hosting, though of course there is added time cost and a technical barrier to entry. I pay $100–$150/mo to self-host Ghost with a bit over 25,000 subscribers.
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For free newsletters, Beehiiv is free for up to 2,500 subscribers. ConvertKit is free up to 10,000.
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@molly0xfff You're a software engineer. Have you considered ways you could help people move into some sort of self/cloud hosting?
Maybe authors could join pools that people buy into and can read a certain number of articles. Maybe you have teams of editors that compile articles for people to read (like the algorithms do today sort of) and they could buy into that and they could buy from the authors.
Cloud costs scale. Traffic can be distributed. Hosting is just technically heavy.
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@crazyeddie helping people self-host at some point just becomes a hosting business, which all of these services provide for (with the exception of Substack) reasonable fees
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@molly0xfff where does the cost go for self hosting? 100$ a month is more than I would expect.
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@SolarDavy Mailsending. I pay $28/mo for hosting (which is for a beefier VPS than I probably need), the rest is for bulk mailsending.
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Adding to this thread because a bunch of people are asking: newsletters are expensive to run because of mailsending, not because of hosting costs. ~70% of my cost is for bulk email. A plain old static blog can be hosted for a couple bucks a month.
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@molly0xfff a static blog, you say
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Ludovic :Firefox: :FreeBSD:replied to Molly White last edited by
@molly0xfff wouldnt self hosting email bé cheaper?
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@molly0xfff when you say you self-host ghost and 70% of your cost is for bulk email, do you mean that you use another paid external service for e-mail sending? and if so, id be curious which one
ty for these stats, this is very interesting
personally, im not at all up for the personal task of trying to self-host an email server and stay out of spam folders, so curious what you are using for bulk email sending.
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@molly0xfff fascinating. do you have an estimate on how many subscribers typically read newsletter posts?
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Molly Whitereplied to Ludovic :Firefox: :FreeBSD: last edited by
@usul bulk email sending is a nightmare i would wish upon no one. sending is easy, delivering is hard.
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@molly0xfff What do you use to send emails? Button down?
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@notplants Mailgun, which is what Ghost requires. I hope at some point they’ll add connectors for other providers.
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@aeva nope, i don’t use any tracking
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@sashin I self-host Ghost, which sends emails via Mailgun
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@molly0xfff @usul from a tech stack perspective, distribution sure would be a lot easier if authenticated RSS was a thing (besides clear text feed tokens). Any other solutions on the horizon?
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