StackPress — Self-hostable newsletter with paywall.

The problem

Substack takes 10% of every subscription forever. For a writer doing $30K/yr, that's $3K to a platform that has actively migrated against the indie-writer ethos that built it. Beehiiv is cheaper but still SaaS-lock-in. Ghost is great but the hosting story for non-technical writers is rough — "just spin up a $5 DigitalOcean droplet" is a nope for 80% of the audience. There's space for a self-hostable stack that's genuinely no-config: one-command deploy, Stripe is built in, paywall works out of the box, and your domain is yours.

Our approach

StackPress is a single binary (or a Docker image) that bundles: a writing surface, a list manager, Stripe paywalls (recurring + one-time), drip campaigns, RSS, and a static-site frontend. One command on a fresh VPS gets you running on your domain with TLS. We handle the auth, queue, and email-delivery (via your own SES / Postmark — not ours). The deploy template is what unlocks the audience that Ghost doesn't reach today.

Where we are

Pre-product. Repo at draft stage; 84 GitHub stars in the first week of the public README. Twitter post asking "would you switch from Substack if this existed" got 312 yes / 18 no.

Where we're going

The default option for any indie writer above $5K/year MRR who values keeping 100% of their revenue and 100% of their list portability. Eventually: a federation layer so StackPress instances can cross-promote subscribers (opt-in) without a central platform sitting in the middle.