Bear Blog
👤 Herman Martinus (Writes a popular dev-log blog; each post converts readers into Bear bloggers, then upgraders. His taste is the product.)🌐 siteherman.bearblog.devGitHub
A weekend hack that exploded on Hacker News, now home to tens of thousands of writers who hate bloat.
Will it work? · our read
Won by subtraction. But a free, open platform is a spam and clone magnet. ARPU is tiny at $5/mo, and the code stopped being a moat once AI could fork it in an afternoon.
01How the money moves
Writer spins up a free blog on a bearblog.dev subdomain
→
Falls for the speed and calm; wants a custom domain + analytics
→
Upgrades: $5/mo, $49/yr or $189 lifetime
02The numbers
$60K
est. ARR (2023)
Latka
10,000s
writers hosted
founder
$0
VC raised
founder
Text-only hosting costs almost nothing, so a solo founder keeps most of it. getlatka.com
About $5K MRR, one person, near-zero costs.
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(demo: preview the full teardown)Sourcesupdated · daily
herman.bearblog.dev - Bear is now source-available (Sep 2025)herman.bearblog.dev - On running a blogging platformherman.bearblog.dev - The Bear Manifesto (no ads, no VC, never sells)manuelmoreale.com - People & Blogs interview with Herman Martinus (Cape Town, South Africa)getlatka.com - Bear Blog revenue (about $60K, 2023)
Revenue is NOT clean first-party: the $60K/yr (about $5K MRR) figure is from Latka/BoringCashCow aggregators dated 2023 and is very likely higher now - hence EST, not independently confirmed. Herman publicly cites reach (tens of thousands of writers) but not exact platform MRR. Everything else - the Sept 2025 MIT-to-source-available relicense, $5/$49/$189 pricing, manual spam vetting, and the no-sell/no-ads manifesto - is quoted first-party from his own blog. No drama invented; the AI-clone and spam threats are documented in Hermans own words. Founding year 2020 is approximate (weekend project that hit Hacker News); Latkas 2023 is only when tracking began. Region corrected to South Africa per the founder own interview (manuelmoreale.com), which states he is based in Cape Town, South Africa - the earlier Netherlands claim traced to a GetLatka data error. We never score you.