That being said, I do think a small investment into moving onto your own platform may be worth it, and that might kick in much earlier than you’d think. I use Hugo and a fork of hugo-minimo-theme for my technical and personal writing, and it took maybe three days to set up (granted I have some technical experience). If you paid a contractor to spend a week setting up a statically compiled site with a CMS, you may get competitive SEO without having to worry about content licensing or platform updates. I think statically generated content is generally friendly to search engines. I don’t update my blog infra at all really, and there’s very few steps involved if I needed to relearn how to do it. It is possible to use free open source software and have it get out of your way in terms of making money.