✒️ Inkpress
A self-hosted markdown blog with zero-JavaScript public pages. Pay once, publish forever.
Inkpress at a glance
| Price | $79, once — no renewal |
| Replaces | Ghost at $9/mo — roughly $108 a year, every year |
| Type | Web app — self-hosted |
| Platforms | Windows, macOS, Linux |
| Category | Productivity |
Inkpress features
⚡ Zero-JS public pages
Pure HTML/CSS, no client framework, no hydration, no bundle — instant load and perfect Lighthouse scores by default.
🎨 3 built-in themes
Paper (light serif classic), Carbon (dark dev-blog mono) and Editorial (magazine, large covers) — switch site-wide instantly in Settings.
🖍️ Server-side syntax highlighting
Code blocks highlighted with Shiki at save time and cached — beautiful dev-blog code with no client-side library.
✍️ Split-pane live preview
The preview uses the exact same rendering pipeline as the public site, so what you see is literally what ships.
📅 Drafts & scheduling
Draft / scheduled / published workflow — scheduled posts go live automatically, no cron needed.
🔍 SEO done right
Per-post meta overrides, OG and Twitter card tags, canonical URLs, RSS with full content, sitemap.xml and robots.txt.
🔗 301 redirect table
Rename a slug and the old URL redirects automatically — never break an inbound link again.
🗄️ One SQLite file
Every post, tag and setting in a single file. Backups are a copy-paste. Runs as a desktop app or on a $5 VPS via Docker.
$79 once — that's the whole pricing page
Ghost charges $9/mo — roughly $108 a year, every year. Inkpress is a single payment, and it keeps working whether or not we ever sell another copy.
Or get Inkpress inside the full suite — every app in the catalog, currently $97 for the bundle. See the bundle →
Inkpress guides & pages
Honest answers
Is it really free on GitHub?
Yes — MIT source at github.com/bensblueprints/inkpress-mvp, always. $79 buys the packaged Windows installer, 1-click setup and lifetime updates.
Why zero JavaScript on the public site?
Because a blog is documents, not an app. No client framework means instant loads, perfect crawlability and nothing to break. The test suite literally asserts there's no script tag on public pages.
Can it do paid newsletters like Ghost or Substack?
No — and Ghost is genuinely strong there. Inkpress is a publishing engine: posts, tags, themes, RSS, SEO. If memberships and paid email subscriptions are the core of your business, Ghost's built-in monetization is worth its fee.