I'm pretty happy with the way I've resolved this. I publish everything to my personal blog first, then once a week I copy and paste it all into a Substack newsletter.

I get to use Substack for email distribution (which would cost me hundreds of dollars a month using most other solutions, I have 66,000 subscribers now) but my own blog stays the original point of truth.

Here's the tool I use for the copy-pasting: https://tools.simonwillison.net/blog-to-newsletter

Substack doesn't have an API for composing a newsletter, but their rich text editor DOES accept copy-pasted data - and copy-paste is the universal API.

▲

rsingel an hour ago | parent | next [-]

You could do the same thing through Ghost, which has an API, and not be using a service that proudly platforms the Tates and nazis.

	▲	willy_k 7 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		I don’t know anything about the specific situation you’re referencing. That being said, getting mad at an organization, one that is built to be a “platform” for people to share their words, for not going out of its way to police which people share which words, seems to me to be unproductive at best, if not actively close minded and tribalistic.
	▲	simonw an hour ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Ghost would cost $288/month (or $241/month paid yearly).

▲

drdexebtjl an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

At 66,000 messages/week, you’d actually be spending around $50-$80 monthly with SES and a VPS + database for handling bounces and unsubscribe requests.

	▲	simonw 42 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		... right, and then I'm responsible for maintaining that infrastructure, and I have to think about email deliverability as well. Plus Substack discovery does carry some value - about 65% of my new subscribers come via the various Substack mechanisms, the rest are from my own site or "direct" (which I think means people landed on my substack directly and then chose to subscribe.)

▲

cosmicgadget an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

It's sort of disgusting that inbox clutter from a publishing service is the dominant delivery paradigm as opposed to browsers natively checking bookmarked RSS feeds.