Self-hosted newsletter without breaking the bank ($0-7/mo)

Note: this isn’t the technical guide for the stack, if you want to see the nitty-gritty technical aspect head to the dev.to guide I’ve created 🚀

A few months ago I decided to pull the trigger and start a newsletter. I’ve been reading trends.vc for a while and found it to be an amazing information source for general business-related trends. The problem was, that I couldn’t find a good resource for developer trends. I knew about daily.dev and a few others, but none of them gave a value-packed drill-down of one specific developer trend each time, every few weeks.

So I decided to create one. If by any chance the newsletter sounds interesting, you should probably check it out here: unzip.dev (oh, and it’s totally free 💝)

Back to our topic, creating the newsletter.

To run unzip.dev I wanted to create a sustainable way to produce my newsletter and not worry about consuming my life with deployment IT. And, all this had to happen fast. I wanted to get something out the door quickly to check the viability of my idea.

Most known newsletter providers did not appeal to me pricing-wise. They can cost over > $100s of dollars a month for a relatively modest amount of subscribers. I needed something that would cost $5-30 a month, as I just quit my job to start unzip and a few other services.

The following setup includes:
✅ An Open-source newsletter system
✅ Zero-downtime, CI & CDN for the newsletter website
✅ $7/mo (can be $0 if you can bear a shared cpu)
✅ Mail link tracking for analytics
✅ Open-source website analytics
✅ Automatic welcome email for new subscribers

To achieve all this goodness, I converged on the following stack:

• ✉️ Newsletter: Ghost (it’s open-source) – I’m using a self-hosted approach as the pricing felt too steep for me at the moment and I’m technical, so I can self-host it.
• 🚀 Hosting: Render.com for hosting so I get zero-downtime and automatic GitHub deployments, you can even pay $0 if you use shared CPU. I decided to opt for the $7 a month so I’d get a better performance as this is used for my main newsletter system.
• ⚡ CDN: Cloudflare, because most of the newsletter site is a static website, caching it via a CDN is great, plus it can help us protect against spambots that try to subscribe (as Ghost doesn’t have captcha at this time).
• 📡 Email provider: Mailgun is the most common tool to use in conjunction with Ghost. It allows us to send bulk emails and to track our open and click rates.
• 📊 Analytics: Umami is an open-source analytics script, like Google-analytics but without all the crazy features and fewer GDPR problems at the moment – I just need something basic.
• 👋 Welcome email: Integromat fixes what Ghost doesn’t provide by default, in my case I wanted to be able to send a welcome email for new subscribers. It was super simple to setup.

If you want to check out the nitty-gritty implementation, head on over to dev.to, where I wrote a more in-depth guide on how to tie all of those systems together so you can run your own newsletter.

If you just want to start out and don’t want to waste time on the technical aspect or you don’t feel comfortable configuring it, you might want to check out:

• Substack: Targeting potential paid newsletters that don’t need a fancy custom theme, everything just works out of the box.
• Tinyletter: Mailchimp’s substack competitor, spotless and simple, free to use.
• Revue: Twitter’s answer to newsletters, it also connects to your twitter profile which is neat.
• Buttondown: a very cool markdown-centric newsletter product, created by a fellow indiehacker! @buttondown, product page.

I’d be happy to retweet any newsletter you create using this stack, so don’t hesitate to mention me and I’ll publish it along :)
If you have any other question, please comment or contact me via Twitter @agammore.