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Interesting how it went from 'just a blogging platform' to 'turn your audience into a business'.

It's hard to sell $300/year managed hosting subscriptions to people who just want a blog. This is probably the same reason Automattic switched to an all-inclusive monoplan at $180/year and got rid of any language that suggested it was suitable for personal blogs.

You are probably right. I still feel a lot of the original vision and promise of the project has been lost in this translation.

Ghost origins were a promise of better blogging (it criticised WordPress for becoming a CMS and then it became a CMS itself).

https://john.onolan.org/ghost/

Ghost starts at $9 per month though -- obviously depends on people's circumstances but I would say that's reasonable for many people as a personal blog

I tried it once. It's extremely limited with only being able to use their few built-in integrations and stock themes with no ability to edit them. $108/year is a lot of money to not be able to touch your theme. An extra $72/year will get you wordpress.com with custom theme and plugin support. Drop $3/month and you can get write.as.

The starter plan is a bad deal.

Not really, even if you’re being sarcastic.

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