What a blog actually costs in year one, itemized

Search for what a blog costs and you’ll get a range from free to several thousand, because most of the pages answering are selling one of the line items. This is what mine cost, and what I’d cut if I did it again.

The real receipt

That’s the whole list. Sixty dollars against $145 earned, which makes the site profitable in a narrow accounting sense and nowhere near an income.

What people buy that they should not

Premium SEO suites. $99–$200 a month to tell you that a site with ten posts needs more posts. Buy this when the traffic justifies it, which isn’t in year one.

Paid themes, repeatedly. One is fine. Three is procrastination with a receipt.

Courses. Everything in a $500 blogging course is in a dozen free posts, including this one. What courses actually sell is the feeling of having started.

Logo design. Nobody has ever chosen a blog for its logo.

Three budgets, and what each one buys

The $600 version is the one most guides describe, because the line items pay commissions. It also front-loads all your spending into the period when you are least sure you will continue, which is exactly backwards.

What I spent, month by month

Almost all of it landed in week one, the ongoing cost of a blog is close to zero.

Against $145 earned, that makes the site technically profitable and nowhere near an income. But the ratio matters: this is a business where the year-one cost is roughly one dinner out.

Year two is the one to plan for. Introductory hosting prices are not the prices you renew at, and what that actually looks like on the invoice is in the hosting renewal trap.

What it actually costs: time

The money is trivial. The real price is about three to five hours a week for a year, and that is the number worth deciding on before you buy anything.

Writing a post worth reading takes me two to four hours. Add an hour a week for everything else — checking Search Console, fixing links, replying to the occasional email. Call it 200 hours over a year. If the blog eventually earns $1,000 a month, those hours were extraordinarily well paid. If it earns nothing, they were a hobby.

Where to spend, if you are going to spend

In this order, and only once the previous one is genuinely a bottleneck: hosting on a longer term (cheapest per month), then an email tool once you pass the free tier, then a paid theme if the free one is actively costing you readers, then a keyword tool once you have thirty posts and need to choose between them.

Everything else — courses, AI writers, logo design, premium plugins — can wait indefinitely. I have spent nothing on any of them and the site earns money, which is not proof they are useless, only that they are not required.

My full setup, including what each thing costs, is in my stack. The hosting is Hostinger on a 12-month term, and that link takes 20% off.

What I underspent on

An email tool, and the irony is that the good ones are free below a thousand subscribers. It cost me nothing and I still delayed, which cost me every reader who arrived and left with no way back.

The expensive part of year one is the twelve months you spend deciding whether to keep going, not the hosting bill.

Where the domain actually lives

This is a small decision that people worry about more than it deserves, so here is exactly what I do. oneblogger.com is registered at Porkbun, separately from the hosting. I earn nothing from saying that — they have no affiliate program I’m aware of, which is the only reason you can be confident it is where my domain actually is.

You have two reasonable options and neither is a mistake:

Take the first-year domain that comes with hosting. Simplest in year one, nothing to configure. The thing to know is that the bundled domain is free for the first year and then renews at the standard rate as its own line item — so the month-thirteen invoice is bigger than the one you remember agreeing to. I set out why that happens in the renewal trap.

Register it separately at a registrar. Costs a little in year one that the included domain wouldn’t, and buys you one useful thing: if you ever leave your host, the domain doesn’t have to move with it. If you want a monetized alternative to compare, Namecheap registers domains from around $4 a year and I do earn a commission on that link — unlike the registrar I actually use. Compare the renewal price, not the first-year price, at either.

What does not matter: which of these you pick. What does: owning a domain at all rather than publishing on someone else’s subdomain, which is the real fork in the road and the subject of the WordPress.com comparison.

The minimum viable bill

Hosting on a 12-month term with the domain and email included, a free theme, Search Console, and a free email tool. Around sixty dollars for the year, and there’s no version of this where spending more in month one makes the blog work.

My referral link takes 20% off any Hostinger plan, and the entry-level one is what I’d actually buy for a first blog — not the $27.99 tier above, which I’m on because I run several sites. The full list of what I run is in my stack; if you haven’t started yet, the starting guide puts these decisions in order.

Real numbers every quarter, including the unflattering ones.