I've been experimenting with newsletter hosting over the past few weeks. You'd think it's a bit like creating a Web site, which is incredibly easy, but it's actually quite complicated, and it all has to do with email.

My newsletter is free and my intent is for it always to be free, which means that I'm footing the bill for hosting. Web hosting is simple and cheap, but newsletter hosting can get expensive pretty fast.

The pros and cons of Substack

I started out on Substack, mainly because it was free and easy. It's quick to set up a newsletter and it's free for the publisher as long as subscriptions are free. If you do charge for subscriptions they take about 14% off the top. For a casual newsletter publisher, this is an attractive offer – no maintenance and no fees. Of course, though, there's a catch. Substack's business is about cross-promotion, when you publish there part of what you're doing is bringing people onto the platform where they can be encouraged to try other (hopefully from Substack's perspective, paid) newsletters. This is Substack's monetization strategy – get people to read and ideally pay for newsletters.

The problem is that Substack makes their money (in part) from newsletters that I don't want to be associated with in any way. They take a very strong stance in favor of freedom of speech, which is certainly their right. If they were just a hosting provider, I wouldn't care. I'm sure AWS, Cloudflare, Namecheap, and all of the other folks in the hosting game have customers I wouldn't want to be associated with either, but I'm not connected to the other customers in any way other than through the fact that all of us are giving them money in exchange for a service they provide. On Substack, there's a deeper connection. I don't judge publishers based on where they land on this – there are a lot of great newsletters on Substack and I'd rather have them publishing on Substack than not at all. I have the technical wherewithal to publish elsewhere so that's what I'm going to do.

As I'm about to get into, actually publishing newsletters isn't cheap and becomes more expensive the more subscribers you have. Substack is providing a pretty valuable service to publishers of free newsletters, and there are real questions about their business model given the valuation of their business. The number of paid subscriber revenue they'll have to bring on to justify their valuation seems unrealistic, and it seems likely that Substack won't be subsidizing free newsletters forever.

All that is to say, Substack is free and easy but it has its downsides.

Self Hosting On Ghost

When I decided to move on from Substack I chose to really lean into my indie web roots and self-host the newsletter. Here's where things got interesting. Ghost is one of the most popular paid newsletter platforms, but you can also host the open source version yourself. The good news is that the open source version is exactly like the paid version. In terms of user experience there's no step down.

I stared out by using the one click Ghost installer on Digital Ocean. The one click experience didn't work for me so I had to set it up by hand, but I was able to get it up and running pretty quickly using the Ghost documentation. It was also incredibly easy to migrate my subscriber list and content from Substack to Ghost. I give Substack a lot of credit for this, they do not try to lock you in by making your data hard to retrieve or work with. I had a Ghost site that was ready to go up and running in a couple of hours. I think the hosting environment on Digital Ocean cost $9 per month.

Things got interesting when I tried to send a message to subscribers letting them know that the newsletter was moving.

Bulk Email

Back in the olden days, you could just send bulk email from any server, but things have changed a lot thanks to spam. These days if you want to send out a newsletter (or any other bulk email) you need to pay a service to do it for you. There are a number of such products, and Ghost works with only one of them – Mailgun. To self-host Ghost you have to separately set up your own Mailgun account and configure Ghost to use it.

Using a bulk email service is required because of spam. Email deliverability is really complex, and the bulk email providers do a lot of work to maintain a reputation that enables their emails to not be automatically rejected by spam filters, including doing some fairly serious vetting of new customers.

Mailgun's cheapest advertised plan costs $35 per month and allows you to send up to 50,000 emails per month. This is ... pretty expensive, especially if you're sending far fewer emails than that. I read online that Mailgun has a Flex plan that charges a metered rate with no minimum monthly spend, but you can't sign up for it any more. I decided to cancel my account because I didn't want to pay the $35 monthly, and when I tried to cancel, they offered to let me switch to the Flex plan, so I went ahead and switched.

The only advertised, fully metered service I could find is Amazon Simple Email Service, It costs 10 cents per 1000 emails, which is substantially cheaper than Mailgun. Sadly it doesn't work with Ghost.

After switching to the Mailgun Flex plan, I set up all of the required DNS records for email delivery (there are a lot), had Maingun verify them, and I was ready to go. Just kidding! I then had to write to work with Mailgun support to verify that I had set up the account for legitimate purposes and wasn't a spammer. At that point I tried to send my "We've Moved" post out, and found that it still wouldn't send. Mailgun rate limits heavily for two weeks while you establish your reputation, and when Ghost tried to send out my newsletter, it failed.

Rather than jump through a lot of manual hoops, I gave up and moved the newsletter to the paid, hosted version of Ghost.

Ghost Pro

My conclusion was that while you can self-host the open source version of Ghost, it's probably not worth it unless you have a lot of subscribers. The Ghost plan for a newsletter with 10,000 subscribers costs $199 per month (billed annually), which is far more expensive than just paying Mailgun for email delivery. The $25 monthly charge for the 1,000 subscriber Creator plan on Ghost is fine for now for me though.

Since I already had everything set up on self-hosted Ghost, moving it to Ghost Pro was trivial – it took me maybe 30 minutes. Setting up a custom domain was also easy. Overall I've been really impressed by the Ghost user experience. It's really nice software.

I thought I was done at this point but it turns out that for spam reasons, you also have to have an email conversation with Ghost support if you import a subscriber list in order to confirm that your list of subscribers was collected in a legitimate way from people who actually opted in. I sent them my Substack URL and that got things unstuck. Once that's confirmed they unlock your account and you can begin publishing your newsletter.

The Economics

The other major paid newsletter host besides Ghost is Beehiiv. I didn't bother with it because it's even more expensive than Ghost ($39 monthly for the 1,000 subscriber plan). The cost the same for both at 10,000 subscribers ($199 per month). The fact that you can migrate to self-hosted Ghost and save a lot of money if your subscriber base grows made it much more attractive than Beehiiv for me.

For a paid newsletter, paying for hosting on Ghost (or Beehiiv) is a better deal than Substack if your subscription price is around $30 or more (less if you have a lot of subscribers). For free newsletters, Substack is the best deal around as long as it lasts.

The markup over hosting in the newsletter space is quite high. On a per subscriber basis, Ghost and Beehiiv are very expensive relative to Mailgun and Mailgun is very expensive compared to AWS. Ideally, Ghost would add AWS as an option, making self-hosting really attractive. The AWS bill for email delivery for a 10,000 subscriber weekly newsletter is $52 per year, as opposed to $199 per month on either of the paid hosting services. You could easily host the Web site for such a newsletter for less than $10 per month.

I Miss RSS

For those who don't know, RSS readers enabled you to subscribe to web sites that publish a feed. Because RSS is a pull-based mechanism, spam wasn't an issue, and publishing a blog was really cheap and easy, which was great for publishers. The good news is that many platforms still do publish RSS feeds. The feed for this site is here. All Substack newsletters have an RSS feed as well. Unfortunately, there aren't too many people using RSS readers these days, and delivery via email seems to be the preferred mechanism for most people in this newsletter-focused era.

Just Publish

I bothered to write this whole thing up because I want to encourage people to publish their writing online, and I think it's important for there to be a healthy ecosystem of places to self-publish outside the established social media platforms.

I'd prefer that you publish a newsletter on Substack than not at all. For folks who don't want to go that route I wanted to lay out what it takes to move away. I would suggest that if you are going to use Substack, you host it on a custom domain that you own so that it's easier to move later if you want to. I'd also add that right now it's really easy to migrate away from Substack, and they're happy to host your free newsletter at no charge at present to fuel their user growth, but there are no guarantees that either of those conditions will hold up.