Show HN: WordPress, Ghost alternative at $29/Year | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: WordPress, Ghost alternative at $29/Year

esyblog.com

18 pointsisandeep199555 comments

Given the amount of customer service per user, feature support, technical support and dev-ops that will be required to run this, I doubt there is any way this business could be sustainable at $29/year/user. Not to mention how you’d actually need to grow via marketing.

If I were you I would stop on this idea immediately and come up with somewhere where the average user would expect to pay $50-$1000 per month for the service. I don’t think this is a good vertical to get into. Your competition are both better than you at the bottom of the market (free alternatives) and the top of the market and there is very little left for you. And even if you do get tens or hundreds of users, it will be just as unsustainable and you’ll also have the guilt when you decide to shut it down and kick all your users off.

Carrd is doing fine at $19/year pricing. I am trying to play the same game here.

"link in bio" is pretty different from "wordpress & ghost alternative".

The fact that any business is sustainable at this price point is not a relevant point, it might have been a bad choice for them too. What you are offering is also a lot more complicated.

Not to mention it’s in the vertical of blogging which has been around for 20 years, in which your offering is very similar to every other alternative, and there are many well known free alternatives.

If you have the technical skill to make a service this complicated, make something that people value more than $2 a month, and make something that hasn’t been made 100 times before. Execution is more important than idea only if the idea isn’t terrible.

Agreed. Your main product is treated as the compliment by companies like domain registrars. They make it easy and nearly free just to sell more domains.

> I doubt there is any way this business could be sustainable at $29/year/user

And especially considering he runs 4 other services

Yeah I am doing fine.

Looks interesting, but the website doesn't give nearly enough information for me to even consider signing up.

What are the themes? What are the custom optimisation options? Can I tweak the CSS? What sites are already using it? Can I see examples? What content modelling options are there? Is there a free trial? Am I locked in? Can I export my data?

Etc.

Yeah there's not nearly enough information for me to consider signing up, not even the privacy policy link in the footer works.

Sorry for that. I will improve the landing page. Will add more examples and videos to it.

Yeah the landing page is pretty poor at this moment, I did not work on the landing page yet. There are currently two different themes. Example blog can be seen here https://nanodevpro.com/blog

$29 is charged to attach to custom domain or /blog

Wordpress is free, and you can pick up a VPS these days for $1/mo. You can't just be another solution, you have to be really, really, really good. You have to deliver something that is head and shoulders above the competition.

You have a few features here, but everything you show in the demo is just table stakes.

    1 GB KVM VPS
    1x vCPU Core
    14 GB PURE SSD RAID-10 Storage
    1 GB RAM
    2000GB Monthly Bandwidth
    1Gbps Public Network Port
    Full Root Admin Access
    1 Dedicated IPv4 Address
    KVM / SolusVM Control Panel
    Available in Multiple Locations
    $11.38/yr

https://my.racknerd.com/aff.php?aff=2502&pid=775

> you can pick up a VPS these days for $1/mo

Don't play this game. "X USD per month, billed annually" is 12X USD per year, not "X USD per month".

How is it the best?

The biggest thing is, is this a sustainable price? And what if I want to move elsewhere?

WordPress is still pretty popular because you can pack up and take your WordPress content and data anywhere (either built-in export/import; or something like All in One Migration)

You can do the same with Ghost—pack up and take your Ghost content and data to any host (using the ghost-cli) but it’s not easy to do seamlessly.

I’m hoping to automate Ghost blog migration but I’m not done yet [1]. Hopefully I’ll find time in August to finish it up, God willing.

1: https://github.com/ayewo/ghost.sh/

Ah fantastic to hear about Ghost picking up these features! Having options is always good :)

Yep :).

They’ve definitely put a lot of thought into the CLI.

For instance, you can stand up a new Ghost blog completely unattended and I figured out how to set a reasonably long admin password using curl rather than leave the admin setup page at domain.com/ghost exposed on the Internet where anyone can easily takeover the blog if they land on that page before you. The risk of it happening is quite low, but it’s still a risk I’m not comfortable with.

Also, the export-import flow using the CLI works pretty well but there are some manual steps involved which I’m working to automate when migrating between hosts.

I’m willing to bet they already have tools for doing what I plan to do with ghost.sh in-house.

Too bad Ghost’s focus is on driving people to sign up for their DFY (Done For You) paid service that is Ghost(Pro).

Man people here are really entitled and mean. I am interested since I am considering rolling my own but this cheap price could be worth it for me.

Just a few questions that the website really doesn't answer:

1. How do I write posts? Is it in markdown?

2. Can I export my data if I want to move to another platform in the future?

3. Where is it hosted?

> Man people here are really entitled and mean.

Meta observation: the initial comments on most articles are often low quality, and it seems to be especially true of Show HNs. It takes time to look at a submission in enough detail to comment on it constructively, which means that the thoughtful comments will invariably come in a few minutes after the shallow dismissals.

https://esyblog.com comes with built in WYSWYG editor. Content stays in esyblog.com's server. Please watch the landing page video. You would understand.

I have disabled Google Docs import feature for now because of low interest. If you want I can enable that again.

Shameless plug: I've been working on Hyvor Blogs (https://blogs.hyvor.com), a blogging platform with multi-language support, custom themes, in-built SEO, custom domain, AI translations, and options to self-serve the blog from your Laravel/Symfony/NextJS apps. It's been very interesting (and not so easy) so far to work on a very competitive market.

lol when did Wordpress become the “Ghost alternative”? I thought it was the other way around?

The title means “alternative to WordPress and Ghost”.

I had the same reaction reading this atrocious title

Quite happy with `sveltekit-blog-template`. Deployed for free on Vercel.

Everyone is not a developer like us.

TANSTAAFL

> Sign up for free $29/yr

> Create your blog $29/year

Is it free or is it $29/yr

It's free if you do not attach a custom domain

Wordpress.org is free.

WordPress.org doesn't offer hosting, and once you install it on a $5/mo VPS you're way past $29/yr.

WordPress itself offers managed hosting plans on wordpress.com. They have a free ad-supported plan, and the cheapest paid starts at $48/year.

That's what they are competing against.

PikaPods.com, managed and only like ~$1.60/mo for Wordpress depending on how you spec it.

I also host my Ghost blog there for basically nothing

There are plenty of managed Wordpress hosts that cost less than $29/yr, often including email too.

If you already have a server, it's essentially free.

Most of the people who are interested in WordPress or Ghost don't already have a server.

This is the classic HN Dropbox reaction.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863

> you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem

I wouldn't say it is quite that extreme. Though you do make a fair point.

(I was thinking about businesses, who usually have at least one server, somewhere.)

No, you're right, it's not that extreme. I wrote the comparison before going back and actually finding the quote, and the quote was much worse (better?) than I remembered!

lol, what does this even mean as an argument? The software is free yes but he's not selling software he's selling SaaS.

> Send Newsletters

> Keep your readers engaged with our newsletter feature.

Can you elaborate on the newsletter feature? Can I e.g. prepare custom content and send any number of emails at any time? Or is this more like an automatic notification after a new post is published?

For now, A post is sent as all the subscriber to your blog. More custom feature like subscriber analytics, article only post, newsletter only post and article + newsletter post would be implemented this August.

if you are looking for a newsletter tool, check out https://recur.email

> The most affordable blogging platform on the market.

prose.sh is free. How is 29/y more affordable?

It's framed as a competitor to WordPress and Ghost. Prose.sh is neat, but this is its getting started page:

> To get started, simply ssh into our content management system

A blogging platform that is accessed by "simply" sshing in isn't in the same market as WordPress.

Free for as long as the maintainers feel like working on it and footing the bill.

What happens when the costs or maintenance require more money or time than they're willing to put into it?

After being burned by "free" so many times, I've grown suspicious of depending on anything like this where there is no obvious path to monetization.

I'm sure prose.sh is a lovely platform, but at least with $29/year I can see the means and motivation to keep it running.

I just finished migrating https://nostashapp.com

Into a serverless stack.

Literally I close the laptop 30 minutes ago. So something can still be a bit wrong.

Nostash cover a tiny market of note taking.

I wanted a space over the internet where I could write documents and have them available to anybody to read.

You can create documents, make them public, make them back private and just share the URL.

The stack is AWS Lambda and Dynamodb.

> Into a serverless stack.

But why? Cost?

Yes exactly.

It serves very very few request daily, make no sense to have a full fledged server running it

I know Dreamhost gets a lot of hate but here me our.

It’s only $2/month.

Includes managed Dreamhost hosting, web hosting for anything you want, email hosting, managed MySQL, ssh, etc.

Needs locale-specific pricing. The way the dollar has been fluctuating recently $29 could be 40-local or 20-local next month.

Very hard to implement that as a single person company.

How so? Have a drop down to select currency, collect in that currency.

On Stripe, I need to create all possible currencies then ?

Probably just the popular English speaking ones, GBP, EUR, AUD, CAD.

Okay got it.

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