Vol. I · No. 3The year-three issueSeptember 2026
The leader
Where should a writer actually put their words?
BylineBase reads the fine print on blogging platforms — what Ghost, WordPress.com, Substack, Medium and the small independents charge, what they keep, and what you can carry out of the door on the day you leave.
The field guideBest blogging platforms
Eight places to put a blog, ranked by what they cost, what they do to your writing and how hard they are to leave.Open the guide
Under reviewGhost
Free and open source if you run it yourself; from $18 a month if you would rather not. Both paths assessed.
Under reviewWordPress.com
The hosted product, judged purely as a place to write — including the April 2026 change that reshuffled its plans.In this issue
The full index ❧
Where Readers Actually Come From, and What a Borrowed Audience Costs
Some platforms hand you readers on day one. That is a real service and it is never free — it is just billed in something other than money.
The Editors, Compared: Where Your Words Actually Get Written
You will spend a hundred hours a year in your platform’s editor and about twenty minutes in its settings. Comparison tables have this precisely backwards.
What a Blog Actually Costs to Run, at Three Different Sizes
The advertised monthly price is the least interesting number in this decision. Here is the real bill at zero readers, a thousand readers and ten thousand — including the crossover nobody warns you about.
Cross-Posting Without Wrecking Yourself: A Canonical Tag Primer
Republishing the same piece in three places is a perfectly good strategy, and a perfectly good way to hand your search traffic to someone else. The difference is one tag and the order you publish in.
The Portability Audit: What Each Platform Actually Gives Back
Every blogging platform has an export button. Almost none of them are equivalent. We pressed all of them and graded what came out.
The Minimalist Blogging Platforms, and Why They Keep Winning
Bear Blog, Write.as and their neighbours offer a text box and almost nothing else. For a surprising number of writers, that is not a limitation — it is the entire point.House notes
Every platform on this site will tell you how fast you can publish your first post. Almost none of them will tell you what happens in year three — when the free tier has quietly become a paid one, when the editor has started fighting the way you write, or when you want to leave and discover the export button produces something no other software can read.
That is the gap BylineBase exists to fill. We read the pricing pages, we read the export documentation, and we write down what we find with the date attached. Every figure on this site was checked at source and carries a date it was last re-read. When a platform changes its terms, the pages change too.
What this desk does and does not do
We rank places to publish writing. We are interested in the bill, the writing experience and the exit — in that order, because those are the three things people regret and the three things marketing pages are quietest about.
- The bill
- The writing experience
- The exit
We do not benchmark servers or publish invented load times. Where this site makes a judgement about how a platform behaves, it is an assessment of documented capability and observable design, and it says so. We do not fabricate quotes from users who do not exist. And we do not soften a verdict because a company runs a partner programme — the top-rated platform in our best blogging platforms guide is one you can run for nothing.
Some links here are partner links, marked as such, and a commission from them pays for the reading. The affiliate disclosure sets out exactly how that works.
Start here
If you want the short answer, the field guide ranks eight platforms and tells you which three questions actually decide between them. If you have already narrowed it down, the full Ghost review and WordPress.com review go considerably deeper than a comparison table can.
And if you are still at the stage of wondering whether any of this matters, read the portability audit first. It is the piece that changes the most minds.