Here’s the short answer. Medium is the better choice if you want readers soon and don’t mind writing inside someone else’s product to get them. Selfish is the better choice if you want a site that is entirely yours: plain HTML files on hosting you control, with no account and no platform between you and whoever reads it. Medium lends you an audience and a way to get paid. Selfish gives you ownership and nothing else. You can’t get both from either one, so the real question is which of the two you’d miss more.
At a glance
| Selfish | Medium | |
|---|---|---|
| Ownership | You own the files and choose the host | Medium runs the platform your stories live on |
| Cost | £3.99 once for the app, introductory — £9.99 from December. Optional premium themes at £1.99 each. You pay for your own hosting | Free to write. Membership is $5 a month or $50 a year at the time of writing, and you need it for the Partner Program and custom domains |
| Where content lives | On your device (optional iCloud sync), published to your server | On Medium’s servers |
| Custom domain | Whatever domain you point at your own hosting | Members only. A root domain or subdomain, not a subdirectory |
| Email/newsletter | None. Selfish doesn’t send email, but it does publish RSS and JSON feeds | Readers can subscribe to get your stories by email |
| Monetisation | None built in | Partner Program pays for member engagement with paywalled stories |
| Audience/discovery | None built in | Built-in readership, recommendations, publications, Boost |
| Editing | Native app for iPhone, iPad and Mac, with live preview | Browser editor plus mobile apps |
| Output | A complete static site: HTML, sitemap, RSS and JSON feeds | Pages on Medium’s platform |
| Lock-in/export | The published site is standard HTML with no Selfish code in it | Export gives you HTML files in a .zip. Your followers stay on Medium |
Where Medium genuinely wins
Distribution
A new Selfish site starts with no readers. It has no feed or recommendation engine and no network of other writers sending people your way. That’s the cost of independence, and it’s a real cost.
Medium starts you somewhere else. It has a readership that’s already there, publications you can submit to, and a recommendation system that can put a story from a brand-new account in front of strangers. It also runs Boost, which gives selected stories wider distribution. Medium’s own explanation of Partner Program earnings says boosted stories earn at a higher rate. If your aim is for strangers to read your first ten posts, Medium is the stronger bet.
Getting paid for words
The Medium Partner Program is the simplest way to earn money from writing without building anything yourself. Medium’s help centre currently lists the eligibility rules as:
- an active Medium membership
- at least one published story
- a complete profile
- a bank account in a supported country
- being 18 or over
- agreeing to the programme terms and the paywall content policy
Earnings depend on how paying members engage with your member-only stories. That covers reading and listening time plus interactions such as claps, highlights and replies.
Selfish has nothing comparable. It has no paywall, no payments and no revenue share. If you want to be paid inside the place where you publish, that settles it.
Zero setup
With Medium you sign up and write. You don’t deal with hosting, DNS, credentials or deploys. Selfish removes most of the friction from self-publishing, but you still need somewhere to publish to. That could be a server you reach over SFTP, an S3-compatible bucket, or an account on Netlify, Cloudflare Pages or GitHub Pages. For some people that one-off setup is enough reason to stay on a platform.
Email to followers
Medium lets readers subscribe to a writer and get new stories by email. Selfish doesn’t send email of any kind. Your readers can follow the RSS feed, and plenty of people still do, but a feed isn’t an inbox.
Where Selfish wins
The address is yours, unconditionally
Medium supports custom domains, but only while you’re a paying member. Its help centre also restricts you to a root domain or a subdomain, so you can’t serve Medium from yourdomain.com/blog. With Selfish your domain points at your own hosting, and no subscription stands between them. The domain and the hosting are both yours. Selfish just writes files to them.
The reader gets a web page
Once you join the Partner Program, stories you put behind the paywall are part of Medium’s membership. Non-members hit the limits Medium sets. A Selfish site is a set of static pages. It has no membership prompts, no third-party scripts and no Selfish code. Themes use no web fonts and send nothing back to anyone. Readers load a page and read it.
The files are the site
When you publish with Selfish, the output is a complete static site. It has standalone HTML for every post and page, archive pages for categories and tags, a sitemap, RSS and JSON feeds, and canonical links. Any web server on earth can serve that, and it will still be readable in twenty years. Your drafts stay on your device, optionally synced through your own iCloud account. Selfish has no servers holding a copy.
Cost is predictable
Selfish costs £3.99, once, with no subscription, no per-site fee and no paywall on publishing. That is an introductory price; it rises to £9.99 in December. The only optional purchases are three premium themes at £1.99 each, bought once. Your ongoing cost is whatever your hosting costs, and static files are about the cheapest thing there is to host.
Leaving Medium, if you decide to
Medium makes it reasonably easy to get your writing out:
- On the web, click your profile picture and open Settings.
- Go to the Security and apps tab.
- Click Download your information, then Export.
- Medium emails you a link to a .zip archive of your stories as HTML files.
Be clear about what that archive is. It’s your text, in HTML. It doesn’t bring your followers or your stats with it, and every link anyone has shared still points at Medium. Selfish doesn’t import Medium archives either. Moving posts means copying them across by hand, which is tedious for a large back catalogue and quite manageable for a few dozen posts. We’ve written more about the process in leaving Medium for good.
You also don’t have to choose outright. Many writers publish on their own site first, then republish selected pieces on Medium with a link back to the original. That way they keep the canonical home and still get some of the reach.
Choose Medium if…
- You want an audience you didn’t have to build, and you’re happy for the platform to decide who sees what.
- You want to earn from your writing without setting up payments yourself, and the Partner Program’s rules and eligibility suit you.
- You’d rather pay a membership than think about hosting at all.
- Email notifications to followers matter to you.
Choose Selfish if…
- You want your writing on your own domain, your own hosting and your own terms, with no membership keeping it there.
- You care that the published site is plain, fast HTML with no tracking and no platform code.
- You write on an iPhone, iPad or Mac and want a native app with a preview that matches the published page exactly.
- You’re fine with finding readers the slow way, through search, links, feeds and people sharing your work.
Where Selfish fits
Selfish is on the App Store for iPhone, iPad and Mac. It’s a one-time £3.99 purchase — introductory, rising to £9.99 in December — and you can run as many independent sites as you like from one app. If you’re weighing up ownership against reach, the user guide shows what writing and publishing look like, and the publishing docs cover each hosting route. Medium will still be there if you want the reach as well.