Ghost pricing explained: what you pay at every list size

How Ghost charges

Ghost(Pro) is the opposite of a revenue-share platform: it takes 0% of your paid-subscription revenue and instead charges a flat monthly fee that steps up with your total member count. "Members" means everyone on your list — free and paid combined — so the price is driven by audience size, not by how much you earn. You keep everything except Stripe's standard processing (2.9% + $0.30 per transaction).

There are three hosted tiers. Starter is the entry plan but doesn't support paid subscriptions, so anyone monetizing starts on Publisher; Business adds higher limits and staff seats. Every price below is the cheaper annual-billed rate, verified by reading Ghost's own pricing slider across all member brackets.

Publisher pricing at each list size

Publisher is the plan most paid newsletters run on. Its price climbs with members: $29/month at 1,000 members, $64/month at 5,000, $90/month at 10,000, and $144/month at 25,000 — continuing up to 100,000 members, above which Ghost moves to custom pricing. Because the fee is flat at each tier and Ghost takes no cut, your effective cost as a percentage of revenue *falls* as your paid base grows — the inverse of how Substack works.

That's the whole strategic case for Ghost: predictable cost that doesn't punish success. See how it stacks up head-to-head in Ghost vs Substack and beehiiv vs Ghost, or put your own numbers into the calculator.

The self-hosting escape hatch

Ghost is open source, which no other platform we track can say. If you host it yourself, the platform fee is $0 — you pay only for a server (often a few dollars a month) and your own time to maintain it. That makes Ghost the cheapest option at any size *if* you're technical enough to run it, and the Ghost(Pro) fee above is essentially what you pay to skip the server administration. For most creators the hosted plan is worth it; for developers, self-hosting turns Ghost into a near-free platform with 0% fees.

Frequently asked questions