Here’s the short answer. WordPress.com does far more than Selfish does. It has comments, newsletters, payments, a plugin catalogue and a large ecosystem. The price of all that is a plan, a dashboard and a site that runs on someone else’s platform. Selfish does one thing: it turns what you write on your iPhone, iPad or Mac into a plain static site and publishes it to hosting you control. If you need features, WordPress.com wins. If you want a small, fast site that’s simply yours, Selfish is the better fit.
First, a distinction worth getting right. WordPress.com is a hosted service. You sign up, pick a plan, and the site runs on its infrastructure. WordPress.org is where the free, open-source WordPress software lives, which you install and run on your own server. This post compares Selfish with WordPress.com. Self-hosted WordPress is a different trade-off, which we cover in WordPress vs a static site.
At a glance
| Selfish | WordPress.com | |
|---|---|---|
| Ownership | You own the files and choose the host | You own your content. The site runs on WordPress.com’s platform |
| 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 plan with ads. Paid plans are Personal, Premium, Business and Commerce |
| Where content lives | On your device (optional iCloud sync), published to your server | In WordPress.com’s database |
| Custom domain | Whatever domain you point at your own hosting | Paid plans only. Annual plans include a domain free for the first year |
| Email/newsletter | None. Selfish doesn’t send email. It publishes RSS and JSON feeds | Built in. New posts can be emailed to subscribers |
| Monetisation | None built in | Paid newsletters and payments via Stripe, with a fee that depends on your plan |
| Audience/discovery | None built in | The WordPress.com Reader, follows and likes |
| Editing | Native app for iPhone, iPad and Mac, with live preview | The WordPress block editor in the browser |
| Output | A complete static site: HTML, sitemap, RSS and JSON feeds | A dynamic WordPress site |
| Lock-in/export | The published site is standard HTML with no Selfish code in it | XML (WXR) export of posts, pages, comments, categories and tags. Media exported separately |
Where WordPress.com genuinely wins
Plugins and the ecosystem
This is the headline. According to WordPress.com’s support pages at the time of writing, you can install plugins on every paid plan: Personal, Premium, Business and Commerce. The free plan can’t. The pricing page points to a catalogue of over 60,000 plugins. Forms, memberships, shops, courses, booking, SEO tooling: someone has almost certainly built what you need.
Selfish has no plugin system. You get themes, header and footer snippets, and nothing more. For a blog that’s usually enough. If your site has to do things, it isn’t.
Comments and community
WordPress.com sites come with comments, likes and follows. The WordPress.com Reader pulls public WordPress.com sites and Jetpack-connected WordPress sites into one feed, where readers can discover and follow them. Selfish has no comments and no built-in discovery. Readers find a Selfish site through search, links and RSS.
Newsletters and payments
Every WordPress.com site includes a newsletter feature. Subscribers can get each new post by email, and you can add paid tiers through Stripe. WordPress.com’s support guide lists the payment fee by plan. At the time of writing it’s 10% on Free, 8% on Personal, 4% on Premium, 2% on Business and 0% on Commerce.
Stripe also takes 2.9% + $0.30 per payment in the US, and the fee differs elsewhere. If your plan lapses, WordPress.com says the fee goes back to 10%. It’s a flexible setup, because you can trade a higher plan price for a lower cut. Selfish sends no email and handles no payments.
Growing into more
On the Business plan and above, WordPress.com lists SFTP and SSH access, WP-CLI, Git commands and GitHub deployments, along with real-time backups. A site can start as a blog and grow into a shop or a membership site without moving house. Selfish is deliberately smaller than that.
Where Selfish wins
Nothing to maintain
A WordPress site is software. It has a database, a PHP runtime, a theme and possibly dozens of plugins, all of which change over time. WordPress.com handles much of the maintenance for you, but the moving parts are still there. A Selfish site is a folder of HTML, CSS and images. It has nothing to patch, no admin login to protect on the published site, and no database to back up at the server end.
It’s fast because it’s static
Every page on a Selfish site is pre-built. The themes are single CSS files with automatic dark mode and no web fonts, and they send nothing back to anyone. Pages load quickly on any cheap host because the server only hands over files.
No ads, no plan to keep up
The free WordPress.com plan shows WordPress.com’s ads to your visitors and doesn’t let you connect your own domain. To remove the ads and use your domain, you need a paid plan. At the time of writing, the UK pricing page shows Personal starting at £3 a month billed yearly and renewing at £5 a month. Prices vary by region and change with promotions. Selfish itself is a one-time £3.99 — an introductory price, rising to £9.99 in December — with no subscription and no per-site fee. You pay only for the hosting you choose, and your site carries no ads unless you add them.
Writing in a native app
WordPress’s block editor is powerful, and complicated with it. Selfish’s composer is plain text with light formatting: bold, italic, links, H2 and H3 headings, and quotes. Under the hood that’s stored as a small Markdown subset. You get autosave, drafts, and a live preview that matches the published page exactly. Photos are optimised automatically. It’s a smaller tool, and that’s the point.
Your hosting, your choice
Selfish publishes over SFTP or to S3-compatible storage, Netlify, Cloudflare Pages or GitHub Pages. Credentials stay in Apple’s Keychain. Your content lives on your device, optionally synced through your own iCloud account. You never need a Selfish account.
Exporting from WordPress.com
WordPress.com’s export gives you an XML file, also called a WXR file. It contains your posts, pages, comments, categories and tags, plus links to your media rather than the media itself. You can download the media library separately. The export doesn’t include your theme design, customisations or plugins. The WXR format is widely supported, so moving to self-hosted WordPress or another platform that reads it is straightforward. Selfish doesn’t import WordPress exports, so moving to Selfish means bringing posts across by hand.
Choose WordPress.com if…
- You need plugins: shops, forms, memberships, bookings.
- You want comments and a community around your posts.
- You want newsletters and paid subscriptions on the same site.
- You’d rather have a managed dashboard than look after hosting yourself, and a plan price is fine with you.
Choose Selfish if…
- You want a blog or personal site, not an application.
- You want static HTML on hosting you choose, with no database and no plugins to maintain.
- You don’t need comments, email or payments, or you’re happy to handle them elsewhere.
- You write on an iPhone, iPad or Mac and want a native app that publishes straight to your own host.
Where Selfish fits
Selfish is on the App Store as one app for iPhone, iPad and Mac, for a one-time £3.99 introductory price that rises to £9.99 in December. It won’t replace WordPress.com for anyone who needs its plugins or community features. If a quiet, fast site that’s entirely yours sounds better, the publishing docs explain each hosting route and the themes page shows the look.