What It Costs to Run My Blog in 2026 – And How Much It Earns

The Actual Costs, and What a Blog Like This Earns

Around 450 posts, roughly 19,000 page views a month, and a question I get surprisingly often: “What does it cost to run the blog and does it make any money?” This post attempts to answer that transparently.

To be perfectly honest it’s not something I’ve given much thought to, so I thought it would be an interesting exercise to break it all down and share the results. I’ll also cover the main platform options available to bloggers in 2026 and explain why that choice matters more than most people realise – it determines not just what you pay but how discoverable your content is and whether your blog can grow at all – before laying out exactly what Ridgeline Images costs to run and what it earns.

A note on currencies: my costs span Australian dollars, US dollars, and Japanese yen, reflecting where different services are billed. I’ve used working rates of ¥150 to the US dollar and ¥105 to the Australian dollar throughout. Exchange rates fluctuate, so treat all conversions as approximations.

In This Post

Main Platform Options in 2026
Blogging Platform Comparison (2026)
What Ridgeline Images Actually Runs On
The Numbers: What It Costs
The Numbers: What It Earns
The Bottom Line (Last 12 Months)
Is It Worth It?

Main Platform Options in 2026

The core blogging platforms have been around for a long time, and their relative strengths and weaknesses have always been fairly consistent – a free Blogspot subdomain was never the strongest foundation for a serious blog, even in 2010. Substack has emerged as a legitimate publishing platform for writers building paid audiences, and static site generators like Astro are a viable option for tech-savvy bloggers who want near-zero running costs. The fundamentals remain the same: the more control you want, the more you need to own your infrastructure.

Let’s take a look at the main options.

Blogger / Blogspot (Free)

Google’s Blogger platform has been around since 1999 and remains genuinely free. If you start a blog there without purchasing a custom domain, your address will follow the pattern: yourblogname.blogspot.com. It costs nothing, requires no technical knowledge, and Google handles everything.

The problem is visibility. Google tends to treat blogspot.com subdomains as lower-authority by default. For newer or less established blogs, the consequences can be severe. I checked the Domain Authority (a Moz metric from 0–100 that roughly estimates how likely a site is to rank in search) of a few regularly updated Japan-focused blogs on free addresses. Most had no measurable score at all. More disconcertingly, one wasn’t even appearing in Google’s index in any meaningful way, despite consistent, quality posting. The content is often good, but the platform is the bottleneck – and in an era where AI summaries are pushing organic search results down the page, domain authority has become more important than ever. It’s increasingly what separates sites that get seen from sites that don’t.

Bottom line: fine for a casual diary; a dead end if you care about search traffic.

Blogger with a Custom Domain

Paying for a custom domain (typically around $15–20 USD per year) and pointing it at your Blogger site improves matters. Your blog gets its own identity – yourblog.com – and search engines take it more seriously. Another Japan-focused blog I looked at takes this approach and has a modest Domain Authority of 16. The custom domain clearly helped, but the ceiling remains low due to a lack of plugin support and limited structural flexibility.

Bottom line: a meaningful step up from a free subdomain, but plugin limitations and platform ceiling make it hard to grow beyond a certain point.

WordPress.com (Free and Paid Tiers)

WordPress.com is frequently confused with WordPress.org, and the distinction matters enormously. WordPress.com is a hosted platform – you blog on their infrastructure under their rules.

Crucially, WordPress.com does not allow third-party plugins on most plans. This is a deliberate decision: plugins introduce security variables that a hosted service can’t easily control. For anyone serious about SEO, performance optimisation, custom mapping, or affiliate tools, this is a significant constraint.

There are exceptions, of course. A couple of well-maintained Japan-focused blogs I follow on this platform have been running for nigh on 20 years and have built a strong online presence – proof that WordPress.com can deliver results for broadly appealing content over a long enough timeline. However, a hiking-specific blog on the same platform, also long-running, shows significantly more modest numbers. The difference likely comes down to the “plugin gap”: a more general blog can thrive without custom SEO tools or mapping integrations, while a niche content site that depends on those features is working with one hand tied behind its back.

There is a business tier of WordPress.com that allows plugins, but it can cost more than a self-hosted setup while still offering less flexibility.

Bottom line: good for writers who want hosted simplicity, but it will cap you if SEO and custom features matter.

Medium / Substack and Other “Publishing Platforms”

Platforms like Medium and Substack have become popular alternatives to traditional blogging platforms. They handle hosting, design, distribution, and subscriber management, allowing writers to focus entirely on publishing.

The trade-off is ownership and control. Your content lives inside their ecosystem rather than on a site you control. On Medium, writers enrolled in the Partner Programme can choose to place their articles behind a membership paywall – readers who aren’t subscribers may be limited in how much they can read, with membership currently costing around $50–60 USD per year. Substack gives writers similar control – posts can be free or paid – but your audience still lives inside Substack’s ecosystem rather than on a domain you own.

For writers whose goal is to earn directly from subscriptions, this model can work. But for niche sites built around long-lasting content – such as hiking guides, travel resources, or technical reference material – putting articles behind a platform paywall can significantly hamper reach and long-term visibility.

Bottom line: excellent for writers building a paid subscriber base; less suited to content that lives or dies by organic search traffic.

WordPress.org (Self-Hosted)

This is the open-source software you install on your own hosting. You pay for a hosting plan and a domain, and from there you have full control: any theme, any plugin, and full database access. This is what Ridgeline Images runs on. It costs more and requires slightly more technical comfort – occasionally that means troubleshooting things like mail server configuration or DNS settings – but it scales properly. When your blog grows, your platform grows with it. When your blog grows, your platform grows with it.

Bottom line: the most flexible and scalable option – and, as the numbers below show, not as expensive as you might think.

Static Site Generators (For the Technically Minded)

Another option gaining traction involves building a blog as a static site. Emma Goto, a fellow Tokyo-based blogger, runs her blog this way using the Astro framework, writing in Markdown and deploying to Netlify on a free tier. Her costs are essentially just the domain name. Tools like Cursor, an AI-assisted code editor, can help maintain setups like this. However, the entry requirement is steep (Git, command-line tools), and there is no plug-and-play ecosystem. For most bloggers, it’s not a realistic option. I’ll leave it there – it’s all quite Greek to me.

Bottom line: incredibly cheap and powerful, but only if you’re happy in Git and the command line.

Blogging Platform Comparison (2026)

What Ridgeline Images Actually Runs On

Ridgeline Images is a self-hosted WordPress.org site, hosted with the Australian provider Panthur on their Business Bronze plan. The domain is registered through GoDaddy.
Paid plugins include:

• WP Rocket – performance and caching
• WP Go Maps Pro + Gold – interactive maps
• Jetpack Personal – includes daily backups and Akismet anti-spam

Yoast SEO runs on its free tier. The theme was a one-off purchase years ago. There is no stock photography and no outsourced content. All photography is my own. Route maps are embedded directly via RideWithGPS iframes – no plugin required. The RideWithGPS subscription costs ¥9,000 annually; it’s primarily a route planning tool, and the blog embeds are simply part of how that workflow connects to the site.

The Numbers: What It Costs

Several of my costs are billed multi-year, so I’ve annualised everything for comparison.

For a site with over a decade of accumulated content, ~19,000 monthly page views, a Domain Authority of 39, and around 3,000 linking root domains, it has an arguably good cost performance. The hosting is the biggest single line item, and even that – billed over three years – works out to just under ¥25,000 annually.

The Numbers: What It Earns

The blog generates income from three main sources. To keep the site running, I use affiliate links for some gear and map recommendations – if you click through and make a purchase, I receive a small commission at no extra cost to you.

• Ko-fi – Readers can support the blog directly via one-off tips or digital products. Over the past 12 months, this came to ¥28,500 – 57 Ko-fi payments in total.

• Affiliate Commissions – Earned from gear recommendations, maps, and related products – the lion’s share from Amazon Associates Japan, plus some referrals via Cocoheli. This generated ¥56,200 – completely passive once the links are in place.

• Patreon – A small, committed group of monthly supporters. This brought in approximately ¥88,200 ($588 USD), making it the largest tracked online stream.

Guided Hiking Tours – The blog also generates business for guided hiking in the Kanto region. I keep specific figures private – it remains a side gig alongside my regular high school teaching job – but it is the income stream most dependent on the blog’s search visibility, and it comes without having to outlay anything on advertising.

The Bottom Line (Last 12 Months)

• Tracked Online Income: approximately ¥172,900
• Annual Running Costs: approximately ¥51,200
• Net Profit: approximately ¥121,700

In practical terms, the blog earns more than three times what it costs to run, before counting guided tours.

The blog comfortably covers its direct costs without advertising of any kind. No banner ads. No Google AdSense. No sponsored content I haven’t actively chosen myself. The site exists to be useful to readers, and it earns by doing exactly that.

Is It Worth It?

Financially, yes – but that’s almost beside the point. A blog that has been running for 13 years, covers a subject I’d be out doing anyway, and opens the door to meeting and interacting with people both online and in person I’d otherwise never meet is absolutely worth maintaining. Plus, importantly, I genuinely enjoy sharing these places I visit and hearing from people who follow in my footsteps.

The question of whether to start a blog in 2026 is a little more nuanced. Competition is higher now than it was a decade ago, and Google’s algorithms are increasingly demanding. However, it can still be done if the platform decision is right from the start. Starting on a free Blogspot subdomain in 2026 and hoping to build meaningful search traffic is, in my view, not a feasible strategy. The indexing disadvantage and the authority gap are simply too large to overcome through content alone.

If you’re serious about building a blog with genuine reach, start with a self-hosted WordPress.org setup from day one. As the numbers above show, you can run a substantial, high-performing site for around ¥51,000 a year if you are selective about your tools.

In return, you get full ownership of your content, full control of your functionality, and a platform that won’t cap your growth.

Thirteen years in, I wouldn’t have it any other way.