The best blogging platforms, ranked by what they cost you in year three

Most lists of the best blogging platforms are written for the first afternoon. They rank tools by how quickly you can get a post live, which is a real concern for about four hours and then never again. This desk is interested in the other end: the year-three question. What is the bill by then? Has the editor started fighting you? And if you decide to leave, what comes with you — the posts, the readers, the design, the URLs — and what stays behind as a hostage?

We have ranked eight platforms against those questions. The order is not a popularity contest and it is not weighted by how generous anyone’s affiliate terms are. It reflects a single judgement: given what each platform charges and what it lets you keep, which ones are you least likely to regret.

How this guide was put together

Every price, plan name and platform term below was read directly from the vendor’s own pricing or support pages on 19 September 2026 and recorded in this site’s FACTS file with its source. Where a figure could not be confirmed at source — a couple of the smaller platforms publish prices only behind a signup — it is described as approximate rather than dressed up as fact. Nothing here is a benchmark: we do not claim to have timed anyone’s servers, and any claim about performance is an assessment of documented behaviour, not a stopwatch reading.

The scope is deliberately narrow. This is a guide to places to publish writing. WordPress.com appears as a hosted product — its plans, its editor, its storage, its export file. Which flavour of WordPress software you might run, and where, is a hosting question rather than a writing one, and it is not what this page adjudicates.

One more thing worth saying plainly: the desk earns a commission if you subscribe to some of these platforms through the links here. That arrangement pays for the reading. It has never once changed an order, and the two highest-rated options below include one you can run for nothing.

The table of places

Ghost — the one that behaves like a publishing business

Ghost is first because it is the only platform on this list where the expensive option and the free option are the same software. The core is open source under the MIT licence, and you can run it on your own server — Ghost’s own documentation suggests an Ubuntu machine with at least 1GB of memory — for the price of the box it sits on. If you would rather not think about servers, the same team sells Ghost(Pro), the managed service, and the revenue funds the non-profit foundation that maintains the project.

Managed pricing starts at $18 a month billed yearly on the Starter plan — $216 for the year — which covers one staff user and up to 1,000 members. Publisher is $29 a month billed yearly, $348 annually, and raises the staff allowance to three. Business is $199 a month billed yearly, $2,388 for the year, with fifteen staff users and a 10,000-member allowance; above that, Ghost quotes individually. Paying month to month costs more than the yearly rate in every case. Starter is the one to watch: it stops at 1,000 members rather than scaling, so a blog that grows an audience will move up whether or not it wants to.

What earns the top spot is not the price. It is that Ghost never behaves as though your writing belongs to it. The editor is clean, keyboard-driven and genuinely pleasant for long pieces. The export is a complete JSON file, not a courtesy. And because the software is the same software either way, “moving off Ghost(Pro)” means moving to a different server, not to a different product. Very few platforms can say that. Our full Ghost review goes through both paths in detail.

The best test of a platform is what happens on the day you want to leave.

WordPress.com — the hosted product, after April 2026

WordPress.com had an awkward decade as the platform everyone recommended and nobody could quite explain. That got substantially easier in April 2026, when the plugin wall came down: since 2 April 2026, installing plugins from the 50,000-plus directory, uploading your own themes and writing custom CSS are available on every paid plan, including Personal, rather than being reserved for Business.

That single change reshaped the value of the cheap tiers. Personal is $4 a month billed annually — $48 for the year — or $9 a month if you pay monthly, and it now includes 6GB of storage, a free domain registration for the first year, and an ad-free site. Premium is $8 a month billed annually or $18 monthly with 13GB. Business is $25 a month annually or $40 monthly with 50GB, and Commerce is $45 a month annually or $70 monthly. The free tier still exists: no expiry, 1GB of storage, a wordpress.com subdomain, and ads that are not yours and that you cannot switch off.

The editor is the block editor, which people either get on with or grind their teeth at, and there is not much middle ground. What is not in dispute is the export: WordPress.com produces a standard WXR file containing your posts, pages and comments, and that format is read by more software than any other on this page. The WordPress.com review covers the plan ladder, the storage arithmetic and the editor in full.

Substack and Medium — the platforms that bring their own readers

These two share a proposition and almost nothing else. Both say: stop worrying about traffic, we have an audience, write.

Substack charges nothing to publish, at any list size, and takes 10% of gross subscription revenue if and when you start charging, on top of Stripe’s processing fees of roughly 2.9% plus 30 cents a transaction. As a blogging platform — which is the only way this desk assesses it — the appeal is that the setup cost is genuinely zero and the reading experience is uncluttered. The reservation is equally plain: the 10% is not a subscription fee that stays flat, it is a share that grows with you, and the design controls are thin enough that every Substack looks like a Substack.

Medium is the other bargain, and a harder one to recommend. Writing is free; reading in full costs members $5 a month or $50 a year. Writers in the Partner Program are paid from that membership pool, with earnings weighted towards member reads, a minimum payout threshold of $10, and payouts initiated by the 10th of each month for the previous month and taking a further five to seven business days to arrive. Medium has also been tuning the formula in the publication’s favour: reads arriving from outside Medium attract a 5% bonus, reads arriving from search engines are weighted higher still, and since February 2026 a writer earns a one-time amount when a non-member hits their paywall and joins to read the piece.

None of that fixes the structural problem, which is that a Medium blog is not really yours. You get an export archive of your text. You do not get the design, the URLs, the recommendation surface or any reliable way to bring the readers along. Our Medium review works through whether the trade is worth it in 2026.

Bear Blog, Hashnode and Blogger — the small and the stubborn

Bear Blog ranks fourth on a list of eight, which surprised us as much as anyone. It is a text box, a Markdown parser and almost nothing else: no themes to fiddle with, pages that weigh nearly nothing, and an editor that cannot be mistaken for a content management system. It is free to use with an optional paid upgrade for extras, and it is far and away the best platform here for the writer whose actual problem is that they keep redesigning instead of writing. The whole case for it, and for its neighbours, is in our guide to the minimalist platforms.

Hashnode is the specialist. If you are writing about code, the built-in audience is the right audience, the Markdown handling is properly done, the custom domain costs nothing on the free personal tier, and it will mirror your posts to a Git repository — which is about as honest a portability guarantee as any platform on this list offers. Outside software writing, the fit falls away quickly. The Hashnode review sets out where the line sits.

Blogger is the strange one. It is free, it has been free since before most of this list existed, Google still runs it, it supports a custom domain you buy elsewhere, and it exports the whole blog as XML. It is also visibly unchanged, and nobody should start a commercial publication on it in 2026. As a durable free home for personal writing, though, it has outlasted platforms with far better press. The Blogger review is unsentimental about both halves of that.

Tumblr closes the list, not because it is bad at what it does but because what it does is increasingly a different activity. Short posts, images, reblogs, a culture with its own gravity. If that is your form, it is free and it works. If you are writing paragraphs, you are in the wrong building.

The three questions that actually decide it

Almost every reader who writes to this desk is really asking one of three questions, and the answer follows from which.

Do you want a business or a habit? If the blog is meant to earn — memberships, paid tiers, a list you own — the shortlist is Ghost and WordPress.com, and Ghost is ahead on the tooling. If it is a habit you want to protect from your own procrastination, Bear Blog and Blogger are better answers than either, and cheaper.

Do you have readers, or do you need them? Platforms with a built-in audience lend you attention and charge for it — in revenue share, in design control, or in the simple fact that the readers are theirs. Platforms without one make you build distribution yourself and charge you nothing for the privilege. There is no free option here, only two different bills. Where readers actually come from takes the question apart properly.

How much will it hurt to leave? This is the one people skip and then regret. Before you commit, find the export button and look at what it produces. A platform that hands you a standards-compliant file has made you a promise. One that hands you a folder of HTML with the styling baked in has not. We audited what each platform actually gives back.

What each platform costs once you are two years in

Sticker prices mislead because they are annual figures dressed as monthly ones, and because the cheap tier is rarely the tier you end on. A rough two-year reckoning, using the rates above and assuming annual billing throughout: Blogger, Bear Blog on the free tier and a self-hosted Ghost on a small server come in at nothing to a few tens of dollars. WordPress.com Personal is $96 across two years before the domain renews at its own rate. Ghost(Pro) Starter is $432. Ghost(Pro) Publisher is $696.

Substack is the interesting column, because it is the only one whose cost is a function of success. At zero revenue it costs nothing. At $1,000 a month in subscriptions it costs $100 a month in platform share plus card processing — comfortably more than Ghost(Pro) Publisher, for a platform you have less control over. That crossover is the single most useful number in this entire guide, and it is worked through properly in what a blog actually costs to run.

Storage is the other quiet cost. WordPress.com’s 1GB free tier and 6GB Personal tier sound roomy until you publish a few hundred images. Ghost(Pro) and the small platforms handle this differently, and it is worth checking against your own archive rather than an imagined one.

Where this desk lands

If you want one answer: Ghost, on Ghost(Pro) if you would rather not administer a server and self-hosted if you would. It is the only platform here that treats your writing as your property in both directions, and the editor is the best of the lot for anything longer than a few hundred words.

If $216 a year is not a sum you want to commit before you know whether the habit sticks, start on WordPress.com Personal at $48 a year — post-April 2026 it is a substantially better product than its price suggests — or on Bear Blog for nothing, and move when you have something worth moving.

And if you are choosing between Substack and Medium because you want readers handed to you, choose Substack, understand that the 10% is a permanent partner rather than a trial rate, and keep a copy of everything you write somewhere else.