I know a lot of people are considering leaving Substack because of the current troubles.
They are looking at Beehiiv and Ghost and all sorts of other solutions that are very expensive. Most people don’t make much from their Substack, so those options are not feasible.
Were I to leave Substack, this is what I would do to keep costs down and still deliver a great experience to readers. There are plenty of other ways, but this is what I would do.
WordPress from a host like Bluehost, Siteground, Godaddy, etc. ($15/yr for the domain).
I personally love both Elementor and Themify. Themify Ultra as a newsletter/magazine template. (themify.me/themes/magaz…). So does Elementor (elementor.com/blog/maga…) You can buy a single Themify theme for $59, and Elementor is $9.99/mo on the low end. You can also go to Themeforest and find a Magazine template for about $25-$50. (themeforest.net/categor…)
I would use either the Newsletter plugin (thenewsletterplugin.com) or Sendy (wordpress.org/plugins/s…) to send emails for $1/10,000 emails and lives right on your blog. There is a $69 cost for Sendy upfront. Newsletter has a monthly cost if you want to unlock all their features.
You do need to have an email set up for your domain, which you can get for about $5/mo from Google.
For your paywall, there are a lot of options, but I would probably use Memberful because they have a free tier (memberful.com/pricing) or ARMember (armemberplugin.com) for the same reason. You can also use Patreon, and they have a plugin for Wordpress that allows you to set who can see what post.
If you want a recommendation engine, then I recommend the Creator Network from Sparkloop (sparkloop.app) for $99/mo. This is easily the biggest advantage of Substack b/c creating these networks is very expensive. You can also create a webring yourself. We used to do it back in the day, and a recommendation engine is just a supercharged webring. I found this tutorial on building one in a simple search (mxb.dev/blog/webring-kit)
This allows you to scale without paying the ridiculous price Ghost or Buttondown charges.
Also worth looking at is Beehiiv, but really only if you are in the AI or Crypto spaces b/c otherwise it’s impossible to find people in their network. Still, they have a flat fee every month, and their tech was similar to Substack.
I think you can do it for a lot less than $100/mo that Beehiiv charges. This allows you to set up a magazine like what you have on Substack for a couple hundred dollars, and minimal ongoing costs.
If you really just want a place to send emails about your book launches and sales, then you don’t really need a full publication and can probably just get away with a mailing list.
I use Flodesk for my emails, which costs $38/mo (but this link can get you a 50% discount for the first year; flodesk.com/c/O97E92)
You can also use wordpress.com and it will probably work for most of these things if you want a simple solution. I have never chosen a simple solution when a complicated solution will do, especially when I get more control.