Molly White

Yep. I saved hundreds or even thousands of dollars a month just from switching from Substack to self-hosted Ghost. I pay a roughly flat $85/month now (~$75 for mailsending, $10 for hosting), vs. 10% of all my subscription income. Here’s some napkin math for how expensive Substack is compared to its competitors:

Has Substack’s subscription model really “maxed out?”

Scott Carney and Taylor Lorenz posted on Substack about downward subscriber trends they’re seeing. Carney pins it on subscription fatigue and feeling like “The only way to grow is to pillage the paid subscribers from other creators.” Lorenz questions Substack’s direction, saying “more and more like this app is becoming another social media feed.” When we recently wrote about writers who are leaving Substack, they mentioned control, pricing, and the social feature creep among their reasons for choosing competitors like Ghost and Behiiv. [Link: Writers are fleeing the Substack Tax | https://www.theverge.com/tech/927294/substack-tax-ghost-beehiiv | The Verge]

Former Substack creators say they’re earning more on new platforms that offer larger shares of subscription revenue

Former Substack writers who exited the platform in early 2024 are making more money on Beehiiv and Ghost thanks to their fixed pricing models.

Migrating from Substack to self-hosted Ghost: the details

I migrated Citation Needed from Substack to self-hosted Ghost. Here is exactly how I did that.

Migrating from Substack to self-hosted Ghost: the details

I migrated Citation Needed from Substack to self-hosted Ghost. Here is exactly how I did that.

timtrautmann.com/ghoststandard

Ghost is lightweight headless server that enables Ghost self hosters to bridge to standard.site with ease..

Ghost: The best open source blog & newsletter platform

Beautiful, modern publishing with email newsletters and paid subscriptions built-in. Used by Platformer, 404Media, Lever News, Tangle, The Browser, and thousands more.

A Full-Network Relay for $34 a Month | bryan newbold

This is an update to a Summer 2024 blog post. At the time, atproto relays required a cache of the full network on local disk to validate data structures. With the Sync v1.1 updates, relays don't need all that disk I/O. What impact does that have on hosting setup and operating costs? Turns out the d...

Bart Piotrowski (@barthalion@treehouse.systems)

Meanwhile DigitalOcean couldn’t afford $50 a month for GNOME and Flathub VMs and cancelled their sponsorship last month.

The Real Reason that Substack is Collapsing

The Subscription Model Has Maxed Out

xbill — what would this cost on X?

Same fetch, X's rate card: $5/1000 posts, $10/1000 profiles. Free here.