However, publishing is not free, you pay in money, your ownership of the content or your viewer's privacy.

That's if the publisher is actually decent and their mechanisms work.

I was addressing the perfectionism - which paul graham's article talks about in a counter intuitive way (sort of "we will not serve a wine before it's time")

As to "paying" I was trying to think of venues where you can publish without compromising.

I think the answer might be something like a $5/mo droplet or something on a cloud service.

There are nice venues to publish free, like here on hn, but you lose control of your work - for example, it could be taken down, it could be heckled, etc...