I have started newsletters on all three of these platforms over the past few years — once for a side project, once for a client, and once just to see how the export worked when I inevitably wanted to leave. That last reason turns out to be the one that matters most, and it is the one nobody thinks about on day one. You pick a newsletter platform when you have zero subscribers and you are optimizing for "how fast can I send the first issue." You regret the choice, if you regret it, somewhere around subscriber two thousand, when the platform's defaults start dictating your business model instead of the other way around. Ghost, Beehiiv, and Substack are the three names that come up in every "what should I use" thread, and they are genuinely different products that happen to share a category. Ghost is open-source publishing software that you can self-host or pay someone to host. Beehiiv is a growth machine built by people who scaled a large newsletter and then sold the tooling.…