Is Blogger Free?

Occasionally, in Blogger Help Forum, we get the querulous inquiry

Is Blogger free, or must I pay for the service?

or

What upcharges will I have to deal with, after publishing my blog?

To answer the question, I'll say

Yes, and no.

Within limits, and excepting for minor details, you can publish a Blogger blog, and maintain it for a very long time, without needing a major credit card.

There are two possible charge items, that I can think of.

• If you want to publish your blog to BlogSpot, the service is free. Publishing the blog to a non BlogSpot URL will require paying for either Custom Domain publishing, or service from a remote server published using FTP. Both will likely cost you some money, though you will not pay the money to Google.
• If you publish a blog with photos, and you host the photos using the native post editor upload, you'll be using the Picasa service. Picasa is free, to a limit, then there is an upcharge for additional Picasa storage capacity.

For a free service, there are very few absolute limits to what resources you may use. The limits that do exist may be substantial to some, and you have to decide whether they warrant you finding another blogging platform.

And, as I pointed out long ago, Blogger does not charge us directly for the service, but they are not a non profit organisation. They are compensated, to a nice profit level.

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