Silvrback is interesting in that its creator, Damian Sowers, aimed to fix the problems he saw with Medium and Svbtle by simply creating what he ideally wanted from a blogging platform for himself. He has now made this available at a reasonable cost of $29.99 / year in the form of Silvrback.

Here’s how Damian describes his reasoning for creating Silvrback:

I built Silvrback because none of the existing blogging platforms satisfied me completely.
Medium is great for readers but it is bad for writers. Readers are steered away to other articles/authors after they are done reading your article. Moreover, the analytics of Medium are extremely basic and you have no idea how people found your article. You really shouldn’t use Medium if you want to build any kind of brand with your writing.
Svbtle is closer to what I wanted out of my blogging platform. However, it is taking the elitism approach and heavily restricting its users. I actually just received an invite to Svbtle but I have grown tired of their UI and I’m wary of any blogging platform that doesn’t charge for the service. As the saying goes, “If you aren’t paying for something then you aren’t the customer, you’re the product being sold.”
Due to his lack of satisfaction with the other tools on the market, Damian created Silvrback with the following features:

• A clean and modern UI (front and back-end).
• Markdown powered and as simple as possible.
• Support for custom domains and external analytics.
• Hosted. People shouldn’t spend any time configuring a server for a blog. Also, you shouldn’t have to worry about traffic spikes crashing your server.
• The platform should have brand awareness in mind (e.g. provide a better way to show and consolidate a person’s distributed accomplishments).
• Trustworthy. I don’t want my efforts and content to be sold to advertisers.
• Hacker friendly. Nice syntax highlighting.
• Precise control over the journey of a new reader (direction of article discovery).

Silvrback was sold to Verde Places LLC, who currently own and run it now and continues to be updated regularly.

Pricing:

• Annual: US$34.99
• Quarterly: US$9.99
• Monthly: US$3.99