On Newsletter Subscriptions

Photo by Anne Nygård on Unsplash

I have waffling the past few days on what I should use to get my words down with and I’ve narrowed it down to substack, ghost or using something else.

Of course, I chose something else.

The easy way would be to use substack and call it a day. If I end up making a killing on email subcriptions, I just have to give them their 10 percent. Think of it as having an agent and this is the fee off the top. But to start substack is free and free is hard to beat.

The problem is that all my efforts are on their servers which makes it easy, but also makes it hard too as you’re tied into a platform. They might be the platform of the moment, but how about in the future? Will this still be the case? I dunno, and this gives me pause.

There’s ghost, but it’s $100 a year up front for the hosting fees. So it would actually cost me a bit to get started which would not be the end of the world.

Lastly, there’s what I am using already: This site runs on Jekyll and is already setup for writing so why reinvent the wheel - yes?

It’s tempting to use the other tools, but I fear over the long term things will change ie: twitter and then I will have married myself to another dead or dying platform.

I have the blogging thing set, but what about the newsletter part? I found buttondown that offers a free service for the first 100 subscribers and then it’s a reasonable amount after that per month. If I’m getting 100 subscribers, then that would be fanatastic. To be honest, I can’t think how I would get mroe than that.

So after an evening of sharpening up my CSS skills, I managed to add and style some subscribe buttons to put on this site. One day I hope somebody will use one and subscribe but I guess time will tell…