What a Blog Actually Costs to Run, at Three Different Sizes

Every pricing page shows you one number. It is almost always the annual rate expressed as a monthly figure, it almost always applies only to the smallest tier, and it almost never survives contact with an actual blog. Working out what a blog costs to run means asking a different question: what is the bill at the size I will be in two years, on the tier I will actually be on?

This piece does that arithmetic at three sizes, using the figures re-read for our best blogging platforms guide on 19 September 2026. All platform prices below assume annual billing, because monthly billing costs meaningfully more nearly everywhere.

Size one: nobody is reading yet

This is where every blog starts and where a surprising number permanently live. The defining feature is that there is no revenue, so every dollar is a dollar out.

The genuinely free options. Blogger costs nothing and has no tier above it. Bear Blog’s free tier gives you unlimited posts, RSS and a subdomain. The WordPress.com free plan has no expiry — 1GB of storage, a wordpress.com subdomain, and advertising you do not control. Substack and Medium cost nothing to publish on. Hashnode’s personal tier is free and includes a custom domain, which is unusual at this price.

The near-free options. A domain is $10 to $15 a year at most registrars, and it is the single best money a new blog can spend — not for appearances but because it is what makes every future move survivable. WordPress.com Personal at $4 a month billed annually is $48 a year, with the first year’s domain included.

Realistic year-one total: between $0 and $60. Anybody spending more than that before they have readers is buying capability for a blog that does not exist yet.

The mistake at this stage is not overspending on hosting. It is committing to an annual plan before knowing whether the habit sticks, and then feeling obliged to keep writing because it is paid for. Guilt is not a content strategy.

Size two: about a thousand readers

Something is working. A few hundred people read a good post. There may be an email list. This is where the free tiers start to chafe, and where the bills begin to diverge sharply.

Storage is usually the first wall. WordPress.com Personal’s 6GB is generous for text and tight for photographs. Uploading images straight off a camera will exhaust it inside a year; resizing them first will make it last indefinitely. Premium’s 13GB at $8 a month annually is the answer if the blog is genuinely visual.

Members are the second. Ghost(Pro) Starter at $18 a month billed yearly — $216 a year — includes up to 1,000 members, and members means everyone who has signed up, free subscribers included. That ceiling arrives faster than people expect, and Starter does not scale past it: you move to Publisher at $29 a month billed yearly, $348 a year, and that tier rises further with your member count.

The domain renews. Year two is when the free-first-year domain starts billing at its standard rate. It is $10 to $15 and it always seems to be a surprise.

Realistic annual total at this size: $48 to $360 depending entirely on platform choice. WordPress.com Personal plus a renewed domain is around $60. Ghost(Pro) Starter plus a domain is around $230. That is a four-fold difference for blogs doing much the same thing, which is why the Ghost review spends so long on whether the membership tooling is worth it to you specifically.

Size three: ten thousand readers and some revenue

Now the arithmetic inverts, and this is the part almost nobody plans for.

At this size a blog may be earning — paid subscriptions, a membership tier, something. And the moment there is revenue, the distinction between platforms that charge a flat fee and platforms that take a share becomes the dominant cost in the entire model.

Ghost(Pro) charges a flat monthly fee and takes nothing from what you earn. Substack charges nothing to publish and takes 10% of gross subscription revenue, with payment processing of roughly 2.9% plus 30 cents per transaction on top.

Work the crossover. At $100 a month in subscription revenue, Substack’s platform share is $10 — far cheaper than Ghost(Pro) Publisher at $29. At $290 a month, the two are roughly level. At $1,000 a month, Substack’s share is $100 against Ghost’s flat $29, and the gap grows every month you succeed. At $5,000 a month, the share is $500 a month — $6,000 a year — for a platform over which you have considerably less control.

A revenue share is not a price. It is a partner you cannot buy out.

None of which makes revenue share wrong. At the bottom of that curve it is unambiguously the better deal, and it removes all risk from a venture that might not work. But it is a permanent arrangement priced as though it were an introductory one, and a writer choosing it at $100 a month should understand they are choosing it at $5,000 a month too.

The costs nobody puts on the pricing page

The domain renewal, every year, forever. Small and permanent.

Email delivery, if you run a list at any scale. Many platforms include a send allowance and charge above it; self-hosted setups need a mail provider configured properly, which is the hardest part of the self-hosted Ghost route.

Payment processing, which sits on top of every platform fee and revenue share alike. Roughly 2.9% plus 30 cents a transaction is the industry norm and it is charged whatever platform you use.

Migration, the cost that only appears once and hurts most. A move from a platform with a poor export costs days of work, and sometimes an archive. It is the reason this desk weights the portability audit as heavily as it does.

Your own time, which is the largest line item in every scenario above and appears on no invoice anywhere.

How to spend the least

Stay free until the habit proves itself. Blogger, Bear Blog or the WordPress.com free tier. Nothing is lost and there is nothing to feel guilty about.

Buy the domain immediately anyway. $12 a year, and it is what makes every subsequent decision cheap to reverse.

Move to a cheap paid tier when ads or the subdomain genuinely bother you. WordPress.com Personal at $48 a year is the best-value step in the category since the April 2026 plugin change.

Only pay for membership tooling when you have members. Ghost’s $216 a year buys capability that is worthless at zero subscribers and excellent at five hundred. Buy it at the point it starts saving you work, not before.

If you go revenue-share, set a review date. Diarise the month your revenue crosses roughly $300 and reassess. That is when the flat-fee platforms become cheaper, and it is exactly the moment you will be too busy to notice.