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Check out https://ghost.org/pricing/ it’s exactly what you are asking for.

That is extremely expensive if all you need is a place to host your thoughts available to a wide audience.

($15/mo basic tier, and if I drag the slider to 20k 'members' the 'creator' tier is at $149/mo billed annually).

Ghost is run by a foundation with a hard limit on revenue. They don't need more users at this point.

Fair enough.

But that probably means that they are currently not a good fit for someone looking to move their Twitter presence to a blog.

They are still pushing FOSS adoption and publish bugfixes regularly. The aim just isn't to have many cheap hosting users directly.

Not speaking for the project here. Just what I understood from conversations with devs.

Personally, I think the combination of blog, newsletter and optional monetization is a good fit for many.

Ghost is self-hostable, and you should be able to get a VPS matching the system requirements for $5/mo unless you get properly popular so need more hosting umph.

Though Ghost would be overkill for a really simple blog, despite its staring point as intending to be just enough tech to host content well (a reaction to what WordPress has/had become).

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