Show HN: Privacy-first, minimal, fast blogging/newsletter platform

At the start of this year I set a personal goal to blog more. I wanted to 1) improve my writing skills, 2) build an audience, and 3) if the stars aligned, start earning a bit of supplemental income via paid posts or subscriptions.

I looked at the existing blogging/newsletter solutions out there, and none of them quite fit what I was looking for. They had paywalls (Medium), features I didn't need (Wordpress), too minimal a design (Buttondown), lacked transparency (Substack), or cost money even when I wasn't earning yet (Ghost).

So, I built my own.

No trackers or tracking cookies are used (beyond Plausible, for privacy-preserving analytics). Speed and minimalism is a big focus: all blogs are rendered as static HTML, using as little JS as possible.

You can write blogposts in markdown, publish them, let your readers subscribe, and (when you're ready) connect your Stripe account to start charging readers for access to paid posts. You also always maintain ownership of your posts, and you can export all data at any time.

Still in the early stages, so any feedback would be great.

Thanks!

https://ghost.org

For my own curiosity -- would you blog more often if someone offered you cheap(er than ghost.org) hosted ghost instance from which you're free to take your data any time?

[EDIT] - To make it more concrete, let's say someone gave you a ghost blog that was free with a soft-capped at 100 visits/day (and $5/month after)

By capping your tiers at number of users you are losing a lot of people who might otherwise use your platform, imo.

Here's my reasoning:

You need to get lots of users to market to so that you can convert those users to paying subscribers. Getting people to sign up for notifications is one thing, getting them to pay money is a whole other proposition. The former is pretty easy and the latter is not. Forcing people to try and do it all in one fell swoop for fear of reaching an arbitrary "user limit" is not reasonable.

The hardest part anyone trying to do this from scratch is going to go through is getting off the ground from a handful of users to a few thousand users. Once they've gotten to that point, and can convert a few hundred of their few thousand users into paying subs, they're getting closer to seeing light at the end of the tunnel. The most feasible way for them to do so is market to their free subscribers / free followers with premium content, engagement with paying subs that they're missing out on, etc.

Ghost chops the legs out from under them when they get to the first hurdle with the 10,000 user limit.

I understand that database costs and email / SMS sending are the expensive part of hosting and have built content distribution backends before, so I get it. I understand the reasoning of putting the limit on pricing tiers there, but it would seem that a more flexible way is in order in Ghost's case. If we presume that you can convert 1% of free accounts to paying accounts, Ghost's pricing page tells its prospective users that they are going to be stuck in a $500.00 / month hobbyist income tier forever.