Medium Alternative: Your URL, Your Readers, No Wall in Between

Medium has changed shape repeatedly — a clean publishing tool, then a magazine, then a curated paid network. Today it is mostly the third thing. ULTRV is the first thing, deliberately, with no plan to drift. This page is for writers who signed up to publish and later noticed how much of the arrangement is not theirs.

Publishing on Medium costs nothing, which is genuinely part of the appeal. Reading you may cost your readers something: member-only stories sit behind Medium Membership at $4.99/month or $49.99/year, with a Friend Membership at $14.99/month or $149.99/year (prices taken from Apple's App Store listing for the Medium app, checked August 2026).

What Medium does well

• An editor and a default typography that are, honestly, very good
• A built-in audience graph — if the recommendation system picks a post up, reach arrives without any work from you
• The Partner Program pays writers when paywalled readers spend time on a post
• Publications: an editor-curated home for work that fits a theme, with distribution attached
• Zero setup. No domain, no DNS, no design decisions

If you want reach on a network where discovery happens for you, Medium is built for exactly that and ULTRV is not competing for it.

The paywall, the follow-wall, and your readers

Every publishing platform sits somewhere on a line between "a tool that publishes your writing" and "a network that owns the audience". Medium sits close to the network end, and three mechanisms put it there.

• The metered paywall. Member-only stories are gated for non-members. That gate is Medium's to operate: the reader is buying access to Medium, not to you, and the subscription revenue is a relationship between Medium and the reader that you sit alongside rather than own.
• The follow-wall. Reading comfortably is nudged toward having an account. Following you means following you inside Medium, in Medium's app, in Medium's feed. If you leave, the followers do not come with you, because they were never a list — they were a graph edge in someone else's database.
• The recommender. What gets read is what gets surfaced, and what gets surfaced is a product decision. A post can do well because the system liked it and badly because it did not, with no signal you can act on. Writing for a feed you cannot see is a strange way to spend an evening.
• And the URL underneath it all. Every link anyone ever made to your work points at medium.com. Search engines attribute that authority to Medium. You can export the words; you cannot export the addresses.

None of that is a scandal. It is the ordinary shape of a network business, and it works for people whose goal is reach. It is worth seeing clearly before you put ten years of writing into it.

How ULTRV differs

• Your domain, from the free tier. Posts live at yourdomain.com, not medium.com/@you. Custom domains cost nothing here, so the canonical URL is yours from the first post rather than after an upgrade.
• No metering, ever. Every post is readable by every reader. No "you have read your free stories this month", no member-only toggle, no sign-in prompt over the third paragraph.
• Subscribers you can actually take with you. RSS, Atom, and JSON feeds ship with every blog, with per-tag feeds and auto-discovery. A feed subscription belongs to the reader and points at your domain, so it survives you switching platforms.
• Nothing deciding what is worth showing. There is no recommendation feed, which cuts both ways: nobody throttles you, and nobody hands you an audience either. Readers arrive from your writing, your feeds, and links from other people.
• A Medium importer. Request your archive, upload it, and the Medium importer brings the posts across in an afternoon.
• More shapes than the article. 84 themes instead of one house style, plus typed pages — albums, recipes, bookshelves, guestbooks, now pages — with their own URLs and layouts. The features page has the rest, including a terminal client and a REST API.

Medium is the better choice if

• You want to be inside a recommendation network and are happy to write for its distribution
• The Partner Program is meaningful to you and a paywall in front of your work is an acceptable trade
• Publications — being edited into a themed home with an existing audience — are part of the appeal
• You do not want to own a domain, and never will

ULTRV is the better choice if

• You want a blog you own, readable by anyone, at an address that stays yours
• You would rather have ten readers a week who came on purpose than ten thousand routed in by a feed
• A reader hitting a paywall on something you wrote for free feels wrong to you
• You want the archive to outlast the platform, in plain HTML you can host anywhere
• The small web is where you would rather spend your writing, and $5/month at most is a fair price for it

Frequently asked questions