You Don’t Own Your Newsletter Subscribers (Until You Do)

On April 2025, Medium hid everyone’s subscriber counts.

I wasn’t worried. I’d already moved.

Six months earlier, I moved my newsletter off platforms I don’t control. When Medium made their announcement, I checked my email list: 1,500+ subscribers. All mine. Real email addresses I can reach directly, regardless of what any platform decides tomorrow.

Here’s the thing: If you’re building in public and your audience lives on someone else’s platform, you’re building on rented land.

The Math That Changed My Mind

• Managed newsletter service: $30-100/month (rising with subscribers)
• Self-hosted Listmonk: €12/month (flat, unlimited subscribers)

But it’s not just about cost. It’s about control.

What happens when they:

• Change pricing mid-year?
• Get acquired and shut down?
• Decide your content violates new policies?
• Hide features you depend on?

You’re at their mercy.

What I Did (And You Can Too)

I set up Listmonk—an open-source newsletter platform—on a €12/month Hetzner server.

See the complete setup on GitHub →

What you get:

• Full control of subscriber data
• Unlimited subscribers
• Modern UI (actually good)
• API for automation
• No platform risk

What you give up:

• Someone else managing the servers
• One-click setup
• Hand-holding support

I wrote a complete guide walking through every step:

• Server setup (5 minutes)
• K3s installation (10 minutes)
• PostgreSQL with automated backups
• SSL certificates
• The whole stack

Time to set up: One Saturday afternoon
Time to maintain: ~30 minutes/month for updates
Years it’ll run: Many

The Trade-Off That Matters

Yes, you’re responsible for updates. Yes, you need to warm up your domain for deliverability. Yes, you’re configuring everything yourself.

But you own it.

When platforms change rules, you’re unaffected. When they raise prices, you don’t care. When they disappear, your audience stays with you.

Read the full guide: Own Your Newsletter with Listmonk →

The guide includes:

• Complete server setup
• All configuration files
• Backup strategy
• SMTP recommendations
• Troubleshooting tips
• Everything I learned doing this

You don’t need to be a DevOps expert. If you can SSH into a server and copy commands, you can do this.

Why I’m Sharing This Now

When Medium hid subscriber counts, indie hackers in my DMs panicked:

• "How do I know if anyone cares?"
• "Should I quit?"
• "My metrics disappeared."

If your entire metric system lives on someone else’s platform, you’re vulnerable.

Rent the amplification platforms (social media). Own the foundation (email list).

This setup is my foundation. It took a Saturday. It’ll run for years.

Building in public? More lessons like this every week: meysam.io