Hello! Uh, 😬

Update: Okay, so I passed the 1,000 person threshhold and this time it did not require me to go up a tier. Instead, it just slid my rate up and required me to pay more up front. For transparency:

So this is manageable. I can do this! I suspect this will plateau out above 3k, but probably not so high that it becomes unmanageable.

Rest of the original post below:

Hi! So, first off, thanks for subscribing! Hopefully, having this setup will be a good way to get me back in the habit (and spirit) of wriing. I like all the interface stuff here! I like the basic, but not overwhelming stats they offer. I can write a post right into the CMS like the lifelong amateur I am!

What has very quickly become tricky is Ghost, the service I'm using to send this to you right now. It has a lot of things that made me choose it over other services: It's open source. It's non-profit. It claims to be climate neutral. It's not, as far as I can tell, a service that proudly platforms transphobes and COVID-deniers.

Unfortunately, it also seems scaled for smaller audiences. Here's where I'm at in this moment:

986 of y'all signed up basically immediately. Incredible. Flattering. I'm floored. Unfortunately, the $25/month plan only supports up to 1000 people. Once I have more than that, they literally lock the ability to publish down. (I know this because that's what happened when I got up over the free tier basically immediately.)

The next tier up doesn't increase how many members I can have, either. To get that, I have to go up to $199/month. Which is UH a lot of money. So, for now, what I'm going to do is turn on a $1/month tip jar style donation tier. If you wanna chip in, sick. And if that evens out to that $199/mo, I can upgrade to that thier and I'll probably end up keeping this going here on Ghost for now. If not, I'll try to find another different service that's more affordable (but also isn't terrible), and import these emails to that. Hopefull that means you won't have to do anything! If that's wrong though, I'll probably make a tweet about it, so I guess keep your eyes open for that.

Thanks again, hopefully next letter will be less panicked and strange.