I think just the $5/mo or so for hosting a WordPress blog and then the $20/yr for a domain name is prohibitive for many people—-not necessarily financially but like ‘oh great now I gotta deal with this’. So that’s why Medium in the past and now Substack etc end up as fallbacks

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pitchlatte an hour ago | parent | next [-]

given that wordpress.com is just managed hosting i wonder if other providers can bring that cost down. installing it yourself is trivial though because of Softaculous, and web hosting is much cheaper.

	▲	drdexebtjl 23 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Not much with Wordpress’s architecture, I would guess. But if you’re writing a blog + CMS from scratch focusing on minimizing costs, you can definitely do it. Serving static text from a CDN cache is essentially free until you’re suffering from success. If you need a CMS, it can scale to zero when you’re not editing, so your only cost scales with the number of edits, not page views, and starts at $0. If you don’t need to edit/publish posts across multiple devices or from different authors, you can make the entire publishing workflow run locally on your device.

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carlosjobim an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

Yes, that's what it is. Even worse if you want to get paid through subscriptions. Although Ghost blog might be a good middle option.