alt Hacker NewsA domain is only ~$12/year if you don't buy it through a scammy site like godaddy that adds fake fees or quadruples the cost after a year. WordPress is easy for blogs, or you can just vibe code something in an afternoon if you don't care to have comments. Even embedding forms or an emailing tool can be done statically. Heck, there's probably a free option out there for simple posting that I don't know about.
The biggest costs are not the money, but the work and cognitive load of the thousand cuts it takes to not only bring all of this up, but keep it running, not to mention migrating the content.
However/also, "only" $12 to some is a considerable amount of money to others.