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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)
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.
For free newsletters, Beehiiv is free for up to 2,500 subscribers. ConvertKit is free up to 10,000.
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.
@molly0xfff wouldnt self hosting email bé cheaper?
@usul bulk email sending is a nightmare i would wish upon no one. sending is easy, delivering is hard.
@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?
@kenny113 @molly0xfff @usul I'd guess that the problem is more that you loose a lot of your readers if RSS is the only form of subscription you offer.
Feed token seems good enough for that purpose. Most probably also work with basic auth but I'm not sure that's really better in any way.
@truh @molly0xfff @usul strange how many replies I get from people I didn’t ask on mastodon. but since we’re here…
certainly there are two sides to that coin. likewise, there are consumers who would be interested in subscribing but would never pay to get more email either. paid email newsletters don’t make a lot of sense to a lot of people. and clearly there are huge distribution issues with email (as we’re discussing here) which can be overcome with different distribution channels. For example, @404mediaco offers a public RSS feed for all articles, but you simply can’t read full articles for members-only content. I would be interested to hear from someone who offers subscription content about why they chose the distribution channel they chose and if they see any “universal solutions” on the horizon.
@kenny113 @truh Feel free to ignore if this isn’t helpful, but I’m a pretty heavy RSS user who also prefers to read newsletters in my feed reader and not in my inbox.
404 Media actually has built out something like authenticated RSS: https://www.404media.co/404-media-now-has-a-full-text-rss-feed/ I’m a paid subscriber to 404 and I just turn off all emails and use the feed. Works great.
I also subscribe to a lot of newsletters via RSS. For paid ones, I usually pay, turn off emails, and add the feed to my feedreader.
@molly0xfff thanks for your response and insights!
Isnt the way @pfefferle implemented ActivityPub into wordpress somewhat close to a bidirectional authenticated RSS
Here's one graph comparing delivery rates:
https://www.emailtooltester.com/en/email-deliverability-test/
@molly0xfff @usul I once applied at a startup that was convinced it made sense for them to self host mailing operations. Except I made a joke that no one hosts their own DNS or mail sending unless they hate themselves before discovering that. I was applying to be a sysadmin. Shockingly, they didn’t hire me.
(Oddly, I ended up doing almost the same work for Private Internet Access’s VPN service, for crypto investor Andrew Lee, claimant to Freenode & the Korean crown)
@molly0xfff @usul Is this true even with tools like Sendy that uses Amazon SES?
@jeromechoo @usul I consider those to fall into the same category of services where you pay someone to do mailsending for you