Ghost Starter vs Publisher vs Business: what each plan actually costs

Three plans, two of which can take money

Ghost's hosted service has three plans, and almost every price comparison on this site quotes exactly one of them. Starter is the entry plan at $15/month; Publisher is the one a paid newsletter actually runs on; Business sits above it at every bracket for more money. The reason Starter never shows up in our cost tables is not that it is expensive — it is the cheapest thing Ghost sells — but that it does not support paid subscriptions at all.

That makes Starter a real plan with a narrow job: hosting a list you are not charging. Take a 1,000-member list with nobody paying and Ghost costs $15/month on Starter. Add a single paid subscriber at $10/month and the same list moves to Publisher (up to 1,000 members) at $29/month — $14/month more, 93.3% on top, for one subscription. The $15 price is genuine; it is just not available to anyone selling anything. Starter is also capped at 1,000 members, so a free list that grows past it lands on Publisher (up to 2,500 members) at $46/month whether or not it is monetized. Both of those exits lead to the same place, which is why Publisher is where Ghost's ladder effectively begins for most people.

Every price here is Ghost's published bracket pricing, verified as of 2026-09-08, using annual billing wherever it beats paying monthly — Ghost's whole 1,000-to-100,000-member ladder is verified, so all three plans can be quoted across it. The Publisher ladder on its own is in Ghost pricing explained, and what happens at each bracket line is in the subscriber counts where your newsletter bill jumps.

Business costs the same at 1,000 members as at 10,000

This is the fact that makes Ghost's upgrade unusual, and it is easy to miss because it is a price that does not move. Business is $199/month at 1,000 members and still $199/month at 10,000 — one flat price across a 10× stretch of the ladder. Publisher over the same stretch goes from $29 to $88/month, a 3× climb. So the two plans converge without Business ever being discounted: Publisher simply grows toward it.

The consequence is a premium that runs backwards from the usual shape. At 1,000 members, upgrading costs $170/month — 586.2% on top of the Publisher bill, and $2,040 over a year. At 10,000 members the same upgrade costs $111/month, the cheapest it ever gets in dollars, and by then it is 126.1% rather than 586.2%. As a share of the bill the premium falls at every single bracket, from 586.2% at the bottom to 45.6% at 100,000 members. Kit's Creator-to-Pro upgrade does the opposite — the dollars grow as you climb — which is worth seeing side by side in Kit Creator vs Pro.

A concrete way to size the bottom of that range: $199/month for Business on a 1,000-member list is more than Publisher charges to host 25,000 members ($141/month). Buying the upgrade early costs more than 25× the list would. That is not an argument against it — it is an argument for knowing which number you are agreeing to, because $170/month is the worst case and $111 is the best, and the difference between them is only where you happen to be standing.

Higher up, the upgrade settles at one price

Past 10,000 members both plans step together and the premium stops moving: $125/month at 25,000, 50,000, 75,000, 100,000 members alike. In dollars the upgrade is now a fixed cost — the same $1,500 a year whether your list is 25,000 or 100,000. As a percentage it keeps falling, because Publisher keeps rising underneath it: 88.7% at 25,000, 60.1% at 50,000, 51.9% at 75,000, 45.6% at 100,000. A big list buys Business at a discount it never negotiated.

A plan premium is easier to judge once you convert it into what it has to produce. Ghost takes 0% of subscription revenue on every paid plan — the upgrade buys features, not a better rate — so your only variable cost is Stripe's 2.9% + $0.30 per transaction. Run a $10/month subscription through the cost model and one paid subscriber nets $9.41. That puts the Business upgrade at 19 extra paid subscribers to cover itself on a 1,000-member list, 12 at 10,000 members, and 14 at 100,000.

Those numbers are small, and small numbers are easy to wave through. The premium is charged every month whether the extra seats and higher limits get used or not, while the subscribers stay hypothetical until they exist — the same test applied to a whole platform bill is in how many paid subscribers it takes to cover your platform bill. What Business adds — more staff users, higher limits, priority support — is on Ghost's own pricing page, linked from the Ghost platform profile. We price plans here rather than rate features, and the feature list is the half of this decision our data cannot speak to.

Which plan the arithmetic points at

For most paid newsletters the answer is Publisher, and it is not close: it is the cheapest Ghost plan that can take a payment at all, it carries the same 0% take rate as Business, and at 1,000 members it costs $29/month against $199. Starter is the right plan only for a list you have no intention of charging — $15/month, 1,000 members, and no way to sell a subscription without leaving it. What a non-monetized list costs across every platform (and where free tiers actually end) is in when does a newsletter platform's free tier end.

Business makes arithmetic sense in one place in particular: near the top of the Business plateau, where the upgrade is at its cheapest in dollars ($111/month at 10,000 members) and its lightest as a share of the bill it has to justify. Buying it at 1,000 members means paying $2,040 a year — more than the Publisher plan itself — for a list small enough that the extra capacity is mostly headroom. Neither of those is a verdict on the features; they are the price tags the features have to beat.

Billing basis is worth a line before you commit. Every figure above uses annual billing, which is cheaper on all three plans — Starter is $18/month billed monthly against $15 billed yearly, and the same discount runs the length of the ladder. The general version of that trade is in annual vs monthly billing. To see the plan fee this sits on top of at your own list size, put your numbers into the calculator; to see how Ghost's ladder compares with the other fully-verified one, Ghost vs Kit. Sources and verification dates are on the methodology page.

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