Substack

Substack collapses a blog and a mailing list into one object. A post is an email and a web page at the same time, subscribers are the audience and the list, and charging for some of that writing takes no extra setup. For a consultant or writer whose website is mostly words plus an email list, the assembly that usually takes three products takes none.

It is a real site rather than only an archive: an about page and other custom pages sit in the navigation, and a domain the writer owns can be attached for a single charge rather than a subscription.

The cost comes in two parts, and both are worth stating plainly. The platform takes a tenth of every paid subscription, permanently, on top of the payment processor's fee — which is nothing while nobody is paying and becomes the largest line item once they are. And design control is close to absent: a publication looks like the platform, with a handful of choices around a fixed shape, which is the price of the writing being the product.