A friend asked earlier:¹

i think i’d like to migrate to a personal site with a place for notes like this [a quick newsletter update] and away from substack. any ideas?

My reply, lightly edited for a more general audience — 

Ghost is a great choice, though it is not free like Substack (you should infer something from that about Substack, at least from where I stand!). At least one friend in a similar space is using Squarespace, which would be my second recommendation (and it was my recommendation to him). I likewise just migrated jaimiekrycho.com to Ghost (from WordPress). Ghost is great because it makes it easy to “blog” or to do a newsletter or both.

Ghost starts at $9/month for a basic site, with blog or newsletter support, on your own domain. I think that’s eminently reasonable. It scales with email subscriber base, so you may want to consider that if you have a large list and don’t have a strategy for making any money from it and/or don’t want to absorb that.

Ghost is basically “everything except the ‘social media’ part of Substack, but you own your own turf, and have far more control over presentation.” Which I obviously approve of. It’s what I would use if my own needs weren’t very… particular.