Hello, I made a similar discovery! However I also found a few ways to reduce the bill:
- Hosting on DigitalOcean where a personal blog fits on a $5 droplet, it did require a few technical skills (using SSH) but that wasn’t too much.
- Analytics with GoatCounter (free for personal use), no cookie and no GDPR notice needed.
- Comments with Commentbox (free under 100 comments / month)
- There’s some free search tools in the forum (e.g.), or for example I see that the free Liebling theme has search included.
None of these require coding skills by the way, just copying-pasting a bit of code in the “code injection” box in your blog settings.
I agree that the apparent simplicity of Ghost is deceiving if you are not a techy person, as I quickly found out that going beyond the basics require either more payments, or technical skills. I’m taking this as an opportunity to re-learn forgotten skills, but it’s clearly not for everybody.