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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.
For those who aren’t a fan of my 20,000 number, here’s a breakdown:
(edited to fix an error in self-hosted ghost for 50k subs)
@molly0xfff Not sure if they fit your needs, but kit and brevo seem a lot cheaper for your volume.
@flo kit is more expensive at my size. not sure about brevo because i’m apparently “enterprise” and would have to request a quote.
that aside, self-hosted Ghost currently doesn’t support mailsending services besides Mailgun, though I hope they will build out support for it in the not too distant future
@molly0xfff at 100k emails/month brevo says 107€ for me (you can adjust the nr of mails in the bottom). Self-hosting email is quite a pain, there's a good talk by Dylan Beattie about email, which touches on his experience of running a large mail-sending service https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mrGfahzt-4Q)