A Medium alternative for your own publishing website and mailing list

Take the concession first, because it is the whole reason Medium exists. Publish tonight and the story can reach people tomorrow through the home feed, topic pages, Boost curation and the Digest email, in front of a membership base reported at over a million across 2024 and 2025 coverage. A Grigora site published tonight has exactly the readers you send to it. No builder can manufacture distribution.

Takeaway: Medium offers built-in distribution, but reach varies by story and account. Grigora requires you to build your own audience.

This is the sharpest line in the comparison and Medium states it plainly. Its email notifications help article carries the note: 'Email addresses are no longer shared with writers when readers subscribe to receive email notifications about stories from a writer.' You can import a list you already owned, up to 25,000 addresses in a CSV or TXT file of 12MB or less, and you can export the list you brought. The subscribers you earn on Medium are not in that export.

Takeaway: On Medium you grow an audience you can count but cannot contact anywhere else.

A free Medium account publishes unlimited stories to its own profile, which is genuinely generous. Three things sit behind the paywall: creating a publication, connecting a custom domain, and enrolling in the Partner Program. All three are listed as member benefits on the live membership page, so the minimum cost of being paid for your writing, or of putting it on an address you own, is $5/month or $50/year.

Takeaway: You pay Medium $50 a year for the right to be paid by Medium.

Medium's custom domain help article is unambiguous: 'Medium does not support Google Analytics, and there's no way to add any kind of code to your page.' That single sentence rules out analytics, conversion tracking, ad and retargeting pixels, A/B testing, chat widgets, embedded forms and every third party integration you might reach for. Grigora's block editor includes custom code injection on paid plans.

Takeaway: You can see what Medium chooses to show you about your readers, and nothing else.

Medium's own SEO article says the platform 'limits content that is made available to third-party search engines, as well as Medium's native search and topic pages', gated by internal trust signals, and warns that it may take time for a new creator to meet the threshold for being indexed. You do get a custom story link, a display title and subtitle for previews, a description on publication subpages and a canonical link on imported posts. You do not get sitemap, robots, redirect or structured data control.

Takeaway: A new writer on Medium can be invisible to Google for reasons they will never be told.

Medium's publication tooling is real: editors, submissions, tags, scheduling, a custom story link, and homepage and subpage layouts you can arrange as grids, streams or lists. It is also the ceiling. Subpages assemble your own stories and nothing else, there are no themes, templates, custom fields or content types, and every page is an article. Grigora trades the submissions workflow for structure you define.

Takeaway: Medium runs a magazine better. Grigora builds a site, and a magazine is one of the things a site can be.

These platforms solve different money problems and pretending otherwise would be dishonest. Medium pays you from the membership pool: member read and listen time, engagement, a Boost multiplier, a bonus on reads arriving from outside Medium with a larger allocation for search referrals, and a final adjustment on your member read ratio, paid through Stripe in roughly 120 countries. Medium does not publish what share of membership revenue reaches that pool. Grigora has no paywall and no memberships. What it has is a store.

Takeaway: If the writing is the product, Medium pays. If the writing sells something else, Medium has no way to take the money.

The second honest concession. Medium's editor is quiet and unfussy, the typography is settled, mobile rendering and page speed are consistently good, and none of it is your problem to maintain. Every story also gets audio narration and offline reading in the apps at no extra cost. Grigora gives you control over all of this, which is another way of saying it gives you the work.

Takeaway: Medium offers an established reading interface; the right choice depends on the design and publishing controls you need.

Medium for Teams, the old business and branded publication product, no longer exists. What replaced it is Group Gifting: you file a support request to have it enabled, buy one-year gift memberships at $50 each with a minimum of 11, and distribute the codes yourself, because Medium sends nothing to recipients. Medium states it offers no discount on group purchases. It is a bulk purchase of individual memberships, not a workspace.

Takeaway: A product you depended on can be replaced with a bulk gift page, and that is the risk of building on someone else's platform.