Pricing
Free to publish.
Fair when you grow.
Writing and publishing are free. You move to a paid plan only when serving your audience starts to cost real money, or when you earn enough that a flat fee beats our small cut — whichever comes first, and always the cheaper one. Every tier keeps the exits open.
Self-host
$0 forever
0% rake
- The self-hostable core, MIT open source
- Your hardware, your rules
- Federates with every plebos instance
- This is the exit guarantee made real
Hosted — Free
$0/month
Free for everyday publishing — 4% only if you charge readers, declining
- Write, publish, and get paid from day one
- Your domain, your subscriber list, full export
- Newsletter + federation built in
- Generous for the working writer and the scholar; very large sending or storage moves you to Sustaining
plebos Sustaining
from $9/month
0% rake — waived on every Sustaining tier
- You're here because your audience costs real resources to serve, or a flat fee beats 4% — whichever is less
- Flat tiers sized by sending volume & storage, priced to our costs
- Priority support; you help sustain the commons
- Same software, same freedoms — Sustaining buys capacity, never leverage
Payment processing (Stripe, ~2.9% + 30¢) applies on every platform — including our competitors — and goes to the processor, not us.
The cap, illustrated.
| Your patronage income | plebos (best tier for you) | Substack (10%) |
|---|---|---|
| $0/mo — just writing | $0 (Free) | $0 |
| $100/mo | $4 (Free, 4%) | $10 |
| $500/mo | $9 (Sustaining, rake waived) | $50 |
| $2,000/mo | $25 (Sustaining) | $200 |
| $10,000/mo | $50 (Sustaining) | $1,000 |
Figures are today's prices, which track our costs and are reviewed as those change; the cap and the open exits do not. This table shows the earning on-ramp — there is also a Sustaining tier when a large audience costs real resources to serve, whether or not you charge for your work.
What's free, and why
If you want a place to publish — essays, research, argument — and you're not putting your work behind a paywall, plebos wants to be your home, and that home is free. Writing, publishing, your own domain, your subscriber list, full export, and federation are free on every tier, always.
Free has one honest boundary, and it isn't your success — it's cost. Reaching readers on the open web costs us almost nothing; sending email to a very large list, and storing large media, costs real money. So the free tier covers generous everyday publishing, and when your sending or storage grows past it you move to a Sustaining tier sized to what serving your audience actually costs — whether or not you charge a cent. You are never paying because you were read. You are covering what it costs to reach the people who read you.
And serious non-commercial work that deserves a home — research, scholarship, public-good writing — can be hosted at our cost, funded by the writers who can pay.
A company, on purpose
plebos is a company, not a charity — and not a startup chasing scale. It aims to earn what it needs to sustain itself and stay independent, and not to grow for growth's sake. Profit here pays to keep the platform running, honest, and uncapturable. It is the charter's Article V seen from the money side: the mission sets the size of the company, not the other way around.
Every tier — including free — keeps the exits open: your domain, your list, full export, federation. Paying never buys your freedom back, because we never take it.— the only pricing rule that cannot change
Start where it costs nothing.
Move to Sustaining only when serving your audience costs real money, or your earnings make it the cheaper choice. We built it this way on purpose.