It's never been cool.

It's the professional equivalent of people writing on blogspot or wordpress.com

A real company will have the resources to setup a blog on their own domain.

> A real company

Maybe I'm in a different bubble, but most of the writers I see on Substack are individuals, not people writing on behalf of companies. If anything, companies using Medium is still more popular. Substack is also quite popular in the literary and arts circles, not just tech.

The thing with writing is that the smallest distraction can make you not want to write. Like, sure, I could go and set up a blog right now on my domain, but I'd have to find a blogging service (GitHub pages? I don't necessarily want to fiddle with markup though), log into my domain, potentially fiddle with HTTPS, and after all that I won't want to write my blog post anymore. And after I've written my blog post, I'm not going to fiddle with setting up my own blog because I don't have anything to write anymore. And next time I have something to write, I'm not going to want to fiddle with setting up a blog.

It's easier than ever to set up a blog. If you aren't interested in figuring out how to host your own, there are paid solutions like Ghost and Wordpress. You can always use one of those and migrate to a self-hosted one in the future if desired.

Ghost is $300/year just to show up and not have extreme limitations on customization. You can't even increase the size of the tiny fonts on the few available themes to something accessible on the base plan.

Wordpress.com recently completely revamped its pricing, pissing everyone off, then walked it back. And it's unclear what motivated it, or what's to come. This is the kind of omen that preceded Patreon's fall from obvious choice to reluctant best option of a bunch of bad or incomplete solutions. Automattic's pricing is more reasonable now, but the single $180/year plan they tried and walked back from hangs over it. It tells me they wanted to shift away from casual bloggers (like someone who doesn't want to worry about maintaining a .org install) to people who are willing and able to pay triple digits for all the features for business or personal PR purposes.

Interesting, I didn't realize either option were so expensive now! As an alternative, maybe something like Dreamhost's $10/yr plan and one-click wordpress installer?

DigitalOcean also has one-click installers/images available for ghost and wordpress, but would still be at least $5/mo.

Both of these options start to go back towards the burden of having to maintain them though.

I don't know if it exists, but maybe there's room for something like a desktop version of Ghost that allows you to write posts/etc locally and then publish to a static github-pages (or s3/etc) site.

Wordpress has been around for 20 years at this point... this sounds like FUD

Sure, that’s why I recommend everyone to just use wordpress

If I'm going to use a free Wordpress host (probably with ads), why not use Substack?

To me the question is why use substack? Wordpress has been around forever, is free, doesn't have ads, and allows you to do customize everything you'd want.

WordPress.com's free plan has ads.

Where? Maybe coz I have adblock

And yet a lot of very wealthy people and companies wrote on Medium.

The only reason is SEO

I don’t know any top blogger who used that platform, so I’m not sure I understand your comment.

Top bloggers aren't stupid enough to put their blogs in someone else's platform.