How much does it cost to start a local newsletter?

Two numbers answer this question, and they are far apart.

The floor is under $10 per month. That is a domain and a branded email address. Every other piece of a starting newsletter has a working free tier.

The number we actually pay is about $367 per month. We run The Austin Newsletter, a weekly city newsletter in Austin, Texas, and the line items are published below with dates.

Most of the gap between those two numbers is tooling we chose to buy, not tooling a newsletter requires. That is the honest shape of this answer: the requirements are cheap, and the decisions are where the money goes.

What do we actually pay to run The Austin Newsletter?

These are our line items as of 2026-08-15.

Before the table, the necessary disclosure: The Austin Newsletter is pre-revenue. It has produced no revenue to date, so this is a burn against zero, funded deliberately while the operation is built. We do not publish revenue projections or payback math anywhere on this site. The honest treatment of the money side lives at is a local newsletter profitable.

Two things in that table are worth saying plainly.

The largest single line item is not the newsletter platform. It is Ahrefs at $249 per month, which is roughly two thirds of the burn. We keep it because the evergreen guide pages on our site are a long-term acquisition channel and we want audit and ranking data on them. A newsletter that has not published its tenth edition has nothing to audit and nothing to rank yet. Ahrefs is the first thing we would cut if the burn had to come down, and it is the clearest example of a cost that is ours rather than yours.

Our beehiiv bill reads $109 because we are on the Max tier and on monthly billing. The public pricing page on 2026-08-15 lists Scale at $43 per month and Max at $96 per month on annual billing. Monthly billing runs higher than annual, which is the difference between the listed $96 and our $109. Max buys branding removal, up to ten publications, and unlimited team seats. A single city newsletter needs none of that.

What does a lean start actually cost?

Every price below was checked against the vendor’s own pricing page on 2026-08-15.

Add the lean column up. A domain amortized is about $0.87 per month. Workspace is $7 to $8.40. The platform is $0. That is under $10 per month in recurring cost for a newsletter that sends real email from a real branded address at a domain you own.

The one-time costs sit alongside that, and entity formation is the big one. Flat LLC filing fees range from $35 in Montana to $500 in Massachusetts, and Tennessee prices per member at $50 each up to $3,000. LLC University’s 2026 average across states is $132. Texas is $300, which is what our own playbook records paying. An EIN from the IRS is free, and the IRS says so directly: you never have to pay a fee for an EIN.

What costs do people forget?

Your time

Time is the largest input by a wide margin and it appears on no invoice. A weekly city newsletter means recurring hours on curation, writing, fact checking, and outreach, every week, whether or not anything else is happening that week. Software prices are the easy part of this question. Sustained weekly editorial capacity is the hard part, and it is the reason most city newsletters stop.

We built our qualification tool around exactly this. The city check is designed to tell some readers that their situation does not fit, and time capacity is one of the reasons it says so.

Entity formation, and when it is actually due

An LLC and an EIN are not day-one requirements to publish. They become required before you invoice anyone, because business payments need a business bank account and a business bank account needs the entity and the EIN. Filing before you have anything to bill is a defensible choice for tax cleanliness, but it is a choice, not a gate on publishing.

A business address you are willing to make public

Entity filings are public record in most states, and the address on them is usually your address. A virtual business address runs roughly $15 to $20 per month according to our own playbook’s research. This is the line item people discover after their home address is already searchable.

Policies

A privacy policy and terms are genuinely required once you collect email addresses. Generator tooling runs about $10 per month according to our playbook. Our playbook’s position is that a lawyer should review your policies once real revenue exists, and not before, because a review before there is anything to protect is money spent early.

Deliverability costs nothing and is still expensive

SPF, DKIM, and DMARC records are free. They are DNS entries, and every registrar lets you add them. What they cost is attention and iteration.

Our own experience is the useful data point here. We set up a custom sending subdomain, verified that authentication was passing and aligned, and confirmed it against a real DMARC aggregate report. Authentication was healthy. Editions were still landing in spam. On 2026-07-29 we disconnected the custom sending domain and moved sending to the platform’s shared domain instead, because a low-volume subdomain has almost no sending reputation while a shared pool is already warmed at scale. That disconnect is not reversible on beehiiv without a full re-setup, and every link in the editions we had already sent stopped working, because the click tracking lived on the domain we retired.

The lesson is worth more than the dollars. Passing authentication does not mean landing in the inbox, and the fix cost us zero dollars and a real amount of work.

List hygiene when you start emailing people

Any outbound work against addresses you did not collect yourself needs verification before it sends, because sending to dead addresses damages the sending reputation you are trying to build. Verification services charge per address. We run every outreach address through one before staging a send. The dollar amount is small. Skipping it is not.

What is genuinely free?

• Publishing itself, on either beehiiv Launch up to 2,500 subscribers or Substack with no subscriber ceiling.
• Email authentication records, which are the single highest-leverage free thing on this list.
• An EIN from the IRS.
• Google Search Console, sitemaps, and the basic indexing work for any site you do build.
• The Supabase Free plan, if you eventually want a database.
• The writing, which is to say the part that actually determines whether anyone reads it.

When does spending more become rational?

Tie each upgrade to a capability you currently need, not to a subscriber milestone.

Move off a free platform tier when you hit its ceiling or need something specific it excludes. On beehiiv that means crossing 2,500 subscribers on Launch, needing automations or the ad network on Scale, or needing branding removal, which is Max-only.

Buy SEO tooling when you have pages worth auditing and rankings worth tracking. Before that, the tool reports on nothing.

Pay for hosting when your site is commercial, because the free tiers of most hosts are scoped to personal projects and you should read that scope rather than assume it.

Pay a lawyer when there is real money moving through the operation.

Our own $367 fails several of those tests on purpose. We are running the tooling early because we are documenting the buildout while it happens, not because a starting newsletter needs it.

What would we cut if we started over today?

Ahrefs, first, and by a wide margin. It is $249 of a $367 monthly burn and none of it was load bearing during the first several editions.

Max tier on the newsletter platform, second. We are paying for multiple publications and branding removal on a single city newsletter.

What we would not cut is the branded email address and the domain, which together run under $10 per month and which every piece of outreach depends on.

If you want the full sequence rather than the cost slice, the companion pages are how to start a local newsletter, beehiiv vs Substack for local newsletters, and the local newsletter business model.

Where the paid product fits

Everything above is free and stays free. What we sell at Regional Newsletter is the part this page cannot fit: the runbooks that turn each of these line items into a decision rather than a guess, plus a lifetime operator community, for $999 once.