Notes · 8 May 2025
On personal sites that aren't on Substack
A short defence of the personal site as a thing distinct from a newsletter platform.
The most common thing a designer or writer says to me, at the moment, when they want to start writing online, is “I am thinking of starting a Substack”. The most common thing I say back is “do you want a newsletter or a personal site, because Substack is one and not the other”.
A newsletter is a thing that arrives in the reader’s inbox on a schedule. The reader subscribes once and then receives the writing. The reader’s experience is the email. The website is incidental. Substack does this well.
A personal site is a thing the reader visits, repeatedly, over years. It accumulates. It has a structure. It has an archive. The reader’s experience is the site. The newsletter, if there is one, is a delivery mechanism. Substack does not, in my experience, do this well.
The conflation of the two is producing a generation of personal-site writers whose sites are flat newsletters with no archive structure, no navigation, no real shape, hosted on a platform whose business model is to extract a portion of their paid subscriptions in exchange for the email infrastructure.
For someone who wants the site, not the email, three alternatives:
Buttondown, Beehiiv, or Listmonk for the email-sending. These are dedicated email platforms. They do not try to be the website. The cost is roughly a tenth of Substack’s per-subscriber rate.
A static site for the writing. Astro, Eleventy, or Hugo for the build. Netlify, Vercel, or Cloudflare Pages for hosting. All free at small scale. All under your control.
Glue the two together by exporting an RSS feed from the static site and importing it into the email platform. Most newsletter platforms will, given an RSS feed, send a daily or weekly digest of new posts. The writer writes once, on the personal site. The email goes out automatically.
The cost of choosing this path is that the writer has to know a small amount of code, or has to pay a developer once to set it up. The benefit is durability. A personal site outlives the platform it was hosted on. A Substack does not.
A note for designers specifically: the personal sites of the designers I most respect are almost without exception not on Substack. Frank Chimero. Robin Rendle. Paul Robert Lloyd. Trent Walton. Rachel Andrew. Una Kravets. Ahmad Shadeed. None of them have outsourced their site to a platform. Most of them have written about why.
If you are a designer thinking about a Substack, before you sign up, ask whether what you actually want is a personal site, with a newsletter attached. The answer is almost always yes. The path to the right answer is not Substack.