I think there's monitization models somewhere there. Off the top of my head, you could go the email route and charge for "premium" features. Analytics, custom domains etc.
Either that or it could to be run as a loss leader for some other service
Either that or it could to be run as a loss leader for some other service
https://wordpress.com/pricing/?compare=1#lpc-pricing
that seem like what somebody would pay. If you'd assume somebody spends 4 hours a week blogging and their time is worth $25 an hour you'd be putting $400 of hour of labor in a month and spending $40 for hosting is a fraction of that. That $25/hour would seem low to some people but high to others: some people are time-rich and cash-poor and others the other way around.
The horrific truth about the "Next Medium" is that it is going to appeal to people who are too lazy to write a successful blog by having GPT-4 write their blog posts for them.