Hello, Pika!

TL;DR: this blog is now hosted at Pika! Many thanks to Barry for the smooth migration.

I was lately using a self-hosted Ghost instance to publish on this blog but I was unsatisfied for several reasons:

• The UI was built around features like paid subscriptions, engagement, growth, …

• The editing experience on mobile was suboptimal

• It was hungry for RAM — my poor VPS had trouble handling three instances even with remote databases.

The few things I liked were that it’s free software and it has built-in first-class citizen email sending capability.

I went on the hunt for another blogging software to migrate my three instances then (this blog and two family travel logs). I wanted something:

• simple,

• easily self-hostable or affordable in SaaS,

• beautiful by default,

• usable by my non-tech wife.

I found many platforms, some of which great but none filling my criteria. They were either ugly, too geeky, crippled with AI, required building things myself, wouldn’t work out of the box, had an editor that’s hard to work with on mobile, pushed towards monetization, weren’t maintained anymore…

Then, I found Pika. It’s not free or open-source software but the people at Good Enough have values that resonate with my own. I found its simplicity refreshing and its pricing fair. It can be customized with color themes and fonts and power users can inject custom CSS. You get 50 blog posts for free and to go further (or to use a custom domain), the subscription is $60/year. They don’t yet have email built-in, but I hear it’s cooking 👨🏻‍🍳

💡 Edit 2026-01-05: Email has landed a few months ago.

Pika is blogging powered by people. No algorithms or AI, but real human beings writing about their experiences. 🐇

I had three blogs to migrate and $180/year for one hobby and two family blogs was not conceivable, so I sent an email to discuss the options. I had the pleasure to exchange with Barry, and he told me that they had in their backlog a “multi-blog” feature on a single subscription. He was kind enough to send a coupon so that I only had to pay a single subscription and we could merge the accounts when the feature lands.

Barry then worked on an import script for Ghost, which would help me get started here without having to manually copy over my posts. It was not 100% perfect but it was good enough so that I only had an hour or so of work to fix a few things here and there.

Once I’ll have migrated the third and last blog, I’ll be able to shut down the MySQL instance that supports it and nearly halve my blog direct costs (from ~95€/year to ~53€/year at the current exchange rates), while supporting people building good enough software.

💡 I’ve since migrated all three blogs. For an update on my setup’s pricing, read this piece.

Thank you very much again Barry, for bearing with my tsunami of questions and helping me migrate. I’m very happy here for now.

I encourage you to try out Pika if you’re looking for a place to host your blog!