GETTING STARTED · 4 MIN READ

There are no affiliate links in this post. Every other guide answering this question is trying to sell you hosting, which is most of the reason the honest answer is hard to find.

You can publish on a free platform today, on their subdomain, at no cost, and reach readers. That is a real option and it is not a trap. What it is not is a plan, and the difference matters more than the money.

This site is not free. It cost about sixty dollars in its first year and has earned $145, so the paid route paid for itself — but only after four months of earning nothing at all. Sixty dollars is not a meaningful barrier. The question is what you give up by avoiding it.

What free actually gets you

A working site, a publishing interface, hosting you never think about, and an audience already on the platform. On Substack or Medium that last part is real: people who have never heard of you can find your writing through the platform itself, which a self-hosted blog cannot offer on day one.

For finding out whether you will actually publish every week, that is everything you need. Which is the job free is good at.

What it costs you instead

The monetization, mostly. Free tiers restrict what you can run. WordPress.com’s free plan does not let you install plugins or run affiliate links the way a self-hosted site does, and the platforms that do allow links tend to take the rest of the upside elsewhere. My $145 came entirely from affiliate links placed where I wanted them. On a free plan most of that is not available to you.

The address. Publishing on someone else’s subdomain means the thing you spend a year building equity in is theirs. Owning a domain rather than renting a subdomain is the real fork in the road, and it is the part of the sixty dollars I would never skip.

The leverage. Everything I do that compounds — the email list, the internal links between posts, the ability to rewrite a page’s links when a partner underperforms — depends on controlling the site. When I found that one affiliate partner was converting at under a third of another’s rate, the fix was rewriting three posts. On a platform that would not all have been mine to change.

The one job free is good for

Answering the only question that matters at the start: will you still be doing this in two months?

I started and abandoned four blogs between 2019 and this one. Not one of them failed because of hosting, a theme, or a platform decision. They failed because I stopped writing. Any money spent before that pattern broke would have been money spent on the wrong problem.

So use free as a test, with a pass mark set in advance. Eight posts, published on whatever schedule you claim you can keep. If you get there, you have learned something no guide can tell you, and sixty dollars is an easy decision. If you do not, free just saved you sixty dollars and a year of guilt about an unused hosting plan.

The expensive mistake is not starting free. It is paying for a year of hosting to prove you are serious, and calling that progress.

What I would do with nothing to spend

Publish eight posts free on the platform with the least friction between you and the publish button. Do not customise anything. Write the posts you would want to rank for later, because you can move them.

Then, if you are still going, buy a domain and hosting on a twelve-month term and move the posts across. You will have lost nothing except some early search equity on URLs that had barely any. What a blog costs in year one has the actual receipt, and the starting guide has the order to do things in.

If you want the platform decision itself rather than the free-versus-paid one, Substack vs WordPress vs Medium compares how each one lets you earn, and WordPress.com vs self-hosted covers the one naming confusion that catches almost everybody.

Real numbers every quarter, including the unflattering ones. One email, no sequences.

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