It's not $10 bucks a month but $1 or $6. I am a paying customer myself and very happy with the service.

They are generous enough to say that if you don't want to pay them money or have a different idea of what a blog should be, then take their software and make it into whatever you want it to be after inspecting their code.

Don't like that either? You can always come to HN and impugn their motives. Never let a good deed go unpunished.

https://writefreely.org/hosting shows $10/mo and up. I guess the OP would have to find the write.as site instead.

You're right - I interpreted the OP as wanting a single blog. The $10 a month or more is for hosting 250 blogs or more. I would say that's a pretty good deal.

How is the model of "download our open source software or pay us to run it" confusing to you?

If you want to "start blogging", you probably don't want to get a full instance, but more a blog on theirs: https://write.as/pricing

I clicked on 'get started' and then 'hosting plans' on writefreely and got these prices:

https://writefreely.org/hosting

Now I see that the prices you mention are linked on the bottom of that page.

Here's the source code: https://github.com/writeas/writefreely

As mentioned, it's an open source project.

> trust somebody from the internet and run their executable on my machine

It’s open source. You can read the source code and compile it yourself.