Fleuron Press

A publishing stack you actually own: a site, a newsletter, and paid memberships. Your words stay in a git repository. Your payments run through your own Stripe account. Nobody takes a cut.

Not released yet. It is being built in the open, and it already runs the publication it was built for. If you want to know when it is ready, say so below and you will get exactly one email.

Why bother

How Fleuron Press compares with Substack and Ghost
Platform	Price	Their cut	Your content	Your Stripe
Substack	Free	10% of revenue, forever	Export only	No
Ghost (Pro)	$9–25+/mo	None	Export only	Yes
Fleuron Press	Run it yourself for about nothing	None, ever	A git repository	Yes

Substack’s cut gets painful precisely when you succeed. Ghost charges a flat fee whether you publish daily or never. This charges you for readers instead of for time.

How it works

Posts are markdown files. Publishing is git push — there is no admin panel, and nothing to log into.
It runs on Cloudflare Workers, Neon, Resend, and Stripe. Every one of those has a free tier that covers a small publication, so the bill starts at nothing and grows with readers.
Readers sign in with a link sent to their inbox. No passwords are stored, because none are ever set.
Members-only posts are one line of frontmatter. Payments, upgrades, cancellations, and dunning are all handled.
Leaving Ghost takes an afternoon: an importer converts an export into markdown posts, subscribers, and redirects from your old URLs.

What it will cost

The template will be free and open source. If a hosted version follows for people who would rather not touch Cloudflare, it will cost about half of Ghost’s entry price, and it will never take a percentage of what your readers pay you.

Tell me when it’s ready

No list, no drip sequence, no launch funnel. One email when there is something to use.

Email me about it