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Ghost.org is pretty solid. You can host it yourself or pay for their service.

In the article they chose to self host. I followed this path as well! So far so good, but I also don’t have a huge viewership so it wasn’t that big a deal

I use https://buttondown.email

Substack is a web site. The alternative that's good for an email newsletter is that you send out an email newsletter.

(Substack will do this, but as far as the email functionality goes, they're not doing anything you can't do by hand, and it's not the way readers are expected to consume the posts.)

I was recently told (right here on HN) that Squarespace has built-in subscriptions. Not sure if it can be connected to their blog "product", but that might be an option. Of course, readers will have to experience the friction of entering their card details.

Unless they changed this in the last month, there is no easy way to automatically send posts to email subscribers. You have to manually set up an email and add the posts. This is really time consuming and led me to switch a project from Squarespace to Ghost.

https://tinyletter.com has worked well for me

DIY using Wordpress

Self hosting since Yahoo! glory days.