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.

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.