I run an independent technical homepage. The monthly cost is about $65 USD. Of course, it's money I can spend on a hobby, but it's still quite a lot. The only reason I can manage it is because I'm a programmer—I can handle things like caching strategies and various other tedious tasks. I get about 600 visitors a day.(The site could be hosted much more cheaply. I deliberately run a more involved architecture because part of its purpose is to serve as an operational portfolio. I needed public evidence that I could design, deploy, monitor, and operate a real system over time. Generally, for a site of about my size, around $40 a month should be enough.)
Writing itself takes a lot of effort.
First:
1.You have to define your target audience.
2.You have to choose topics they'll find interesting.
3.You need to collect materials.
4.You read through the materials, build the structure, and go through multiple drafts and revisions.
Even a short post usually takes about a week. And even after all that, will people actually read it? Not really. So I have to promote it on external sites like HN and Reddit, and keep updating the sitemap until my site starts showing up in Google search results.
The problem is that most people want to make money through writing. That's completely understandable. With the economy getting tougher, even hobbies cost money.
The issue is that once you step away from platforms like Substack and Medium, it becomes much harder for people to find your content, and you lose the community itself. In fact, that's the real strength of Substack and Medium—people are already there to spend money because they're earning from the same ecosystem. But if you move to an independent site, even putting up ads can cause strong backlash (especially since Google often shows low-quality ads—like porn ads—to people who don't share their personal data).
In my case, I created my site because I needed a portfolio that made me look professional. Since I don't have experience at prestigious companies or universities, and I've mostly moved between small contractors, I needed something to show that I know certain things, have relevant experience, and have built actual products. (In the Korean market, the only work available to programmers without capital is small NDA-bound jobs.)
On the other hand, people with good careers don't need to take this risk—their reputation comes from successful products they've worked on in the market.
So I needed a metric like 'I run my own site, it uses MSA, and I have experience running it stably over the long term.' Of course, I could list the projects I've worked on, but most of them don't have a strong track record of market success. So I think that unless you're in a special situation, it's better to stay within existing writing communities.