The Best Platforms to Build in Public, and What Each One Is Good For

The best platforms to build in public depend on what you want back from sharing your work. Choose by that:

• Reach in tech and startups, and a launch day: X.
• A professional audience, B2B work or hiring: LinkedIn.
• A record you own that search engines find: a blog.
• Feedback from other founders on revenue, pricing and launches: Indie Hackers.
• A list of readers you own, and a way to charge them: a newsletter.
• Every project in one place, with its state and its dated history: a meinpublic map, once it opens.

You don’t have to pick one. Each of these does one job well, so you can use two: one where your audience already reads, and one that keeps the record. This comparison from the meinpublic blog is for anyone who has decided to share what they make while they make it and is choosing where. meinpublic is one of the six options, so it gets the same treatment, including what it can’t do yet. The line through all six: a feed shows moments, a CV polishes the past, a map shows the whole person.

The six options side by side

Option	Cost to start	What it keeps	Reach of its own	Better for
X	Free, 280 characters a post	Posts in a feed	21% of US adults (2025)	Tech reach, launches
LinkedIn	Free; Premium Career US$39.99 a month	Posts and a CV-shaped profile	32% of US adults (2024)	B2B work, hiring
A blog	A .com from $11.08 a year	Posts in date order, on your domain	None until search finds it	A record you own
Indie Hackers	An account; some case studies need IH+	Posts in a founders’ community	Other founders	Feedback on numbers
A newsletter	Free to 2,500 readers on beehiiv	Issues, and a list you own	None: you bring readers	Readers you own, paid issues
A meinpublic map	Reading free; a map is $5 a month	Every project, its state and history	None: no audience to lend	All you do, as it moves

X: reach in tech, for about 80 minutes

Choose X when you want reach among people in tech and startups, and attention on a launch day. A free account posts up to 280 characters. Since October 2026, X Help says new customers start on The X Subscription, which also covers Grok and Cursor. The first three of its plans, on xAI’s pricing page:

• Free: $0.
• Plus: $8 a month.
• Premium: $30 a month.

The audience is real but narrower than it feels from inside. The Pew Research Center found that 21% of US adults use X, and 10% use it daily (2025). 12% regularly get news there (2025). In 2021, when X was still Twitter, Pew found that the top 25% of US users by volume wrote 97% of all tweets.

The cost is speed. In 2023, Pfeffer, Matter and Sargsyan measured a median half-life of about 80 minutes for a tweet: half of its impressions arrive in that time. Topics fade faster too. Lorenz-Spreen and colleagues found in Nature Communications that a hashtag stayed in Twitter’s top 50 for 17.5 hours on average in 2013, and 11.9 hours in 2016 (2019). A thread about month three of your project is gone before month four.

LinkedIn: a professional audience, around a CV

Choose LinkedIn for B2B work and for hiring or being hired, where your readers are buyers and recruiters. About LinkedIn counts more than 1 billion members, and Pew found that 32% of US adults use LinkedIn (2024). Posting is free, and Premium Career starts at US$39.99 a month.

The profile is shaped like a CV. LinkedIn Help says Experience holds jobs, internships and contract positions, so it polishes the past, and posts move through a feed like X’s. A side project that stalled, or a health goal, has no natural home there. The full comparison of a profile, a personal website and a map is in meinpublic vs. LinkedIn.

A blog: a record you own, one post at a time

Choose a blog when you want a record you own that search engines can still find years later. It can cost very little:

• A domain: a .com is $11.08 the first year and to renew at Porkbun, and Cloudflare Registrar sells domains with no markup.
• Free hosting: GitHub Pages works from a public repository on GitHub’s free plan, and a published site can be up to 1 GB.
• Hosting with an editor: WordPress.com puts its Personal plan with a .com at $4 a month in year one and $5 in year two, billed yearly.

The trade-off is shape and reach. A blog keeps posts in date order, so a reader who wants to know where a project stands today reads back through months of entries. And it has no audience of its own: readers arrive through search, or through links you share elsewhere.

Indie Hackers: feedback from other founders

Choose Indie Hackers when you want other founders to look at your revenue or your pricing and tell you what they think. TechCrunch reported in April 2017 that Stripe had acquired Indie Hackers, which Courtland Allen told it he set out to build in July 2016. On April 6, 2023, Indie Hackers announced it was indie again: a standalone business owned by its founders, Courtland and Channing Allen, with Stripe as an investor. Courtland’s announcement put the new business’s revenue in the open:

Right now, we’re sitting at exactly $0 MRR, so the journey is just now (re)starting.

Courtland Allen, “Indie Hackers is Indie Again!”, April 6, 2023

Its readers are founders. On Oct 18, 2026, the stories featured on the Indie Hackers homepage led with monthly revenue, some of them for IH+ subscribers only. That makes it the right room for a question about churn or a price change, and a narrow one if your work isn’t a business, or if you want your customers to watch it grow.

A newsletter: readers you own, and a way to charge

Choose a newsletter when you want a list of readers that belongs to you, and the option to charge them. The list goes with you if you change tools, which no feed allows. Two common starting costs:

• beehiiv: its Free plan holds up to 2,500 subscribers, and its cheapest paid plan, Lite, starts at $49 a month billed yearly, for up to 1,000 subscribers.
• Substack: publishing is free at any number of subscribers, and when you charge, Substack keeps 10% of each subscription payment, plus Stripe’s fees of 2.9% + $0.30 per US card payment and 0.7% for recurring billing.

Like a blog, a newsletter keeps the record one issue at a time, in date order, and it starts with no readers. Every subscriber is one you brought.

A meinpublic map: the whole record, without an audience yet

Choose a meinpublic map when you want everything you are making, work and life, kept in one place where anyone can see where each thing stands. Each person keeps one public map. Every project is a node with a dated timeline, and its distance from the centre shows its state: live, finished, parked or let go. A stall shows as plainly as a launch, which is why the essay Parked Is Not Failed argues for keeping it. It leaves out likes and follower counts, and nothing is ranked, so there is nothing to perform for.

A map records what you did, not what you announced, and that matters. Gollwitzer and colleagues found that people whose identity goal had been noticed by others acted on it less: 1.92 days in a week, against 2.70 when it stayed private (Psychological Science, 2009). A dated update is a record of an action, not a promise.

The founder’s own map shows the shape. Tiến’s map on the About page, dated 16 Oct 2026, holds 7 nodes in 4 areas:

• Builder: three products, meinpublic, maptoact and cendora;
• Health: Reach 60 kg;
• Family: Father: good habits, and Father: a nice life;
• Content: a Tech, farm & edu channel that is still an idea.

Reading a map is free. Keeping one costs $5 a month or $50 a year after a 30-day trial, and the first 300 founding members get their first year free. Two things every other option here does better today. The app isn’t open yet, so the only real map is Tiến’s. And meinpublic has no audience of its own to lend you: people find your map through the links you share elsewhere. A map doesn’t replace the places where your audience already reads. It’s the place your posts there can point to.