Ghost(Pro) Review 2026: Pricing by Members, Limits & Fees

Ghost's pricing page shows one price per plan for the member count chosen on a slider, but the page's script carries every step. Starter is $18 a month billed monthly or $180 a year, which the page displays as $15 a month, and it exists only up to 1,000 members. Publisher at 1,000 members is $35 monthly or $348 a year ($29 a month), then $55 at 2,500, $75 at 5,000, $95 at 7,500, $105 at 10,000, $169 at 25,000, $249 at 50,000, $289 at 75,000 and $329 at 100,000 members billed monthly, with yearly equivalents of $552, $756, $948, $1,056, $1,692, $2,496, $2,892 and $3,288. Business is $239 monthly or $2,388 a year ($199 a month) for everything up to 10,000 members, then $319 at 25,000, $399 at 50,000, $439 at 75,000 and $479 at 100,000 monthly, or $3,192, $3,996, $4,392 and $4,788 a year. Above 100,000 members the page asks you to reach out to Ghost's team.

Yearly billing therefore saves about 17% at each step: $180 against $216 for Starter, $348 against $420 for Publisher at 1,000 members, and $2,388 against $2,868 for Business. The help centre's discounts article says annual subscribers receive a 20% discount on all plans, which the published numbers do not reach; this review treats the price data as authoritative and the article as out of date, and notes that Ghost offers no further discount for students, open-source developers or non-profits, pointing them to self-hosting instead.

The pricing page frames the plans by audience: Starter for solo blogs and newsletters, Publisher for custom publications, Business for teams scaling up, and Custom for complex needs with unlimited staff and members, a dedicated IP, SSO and a 99.9% uptime SLA. It also states there are no payment fees and that you can upgrade, downgrade or cancel anytime, and the subscription-management article confirms that plan or frequency changes take effect immediately with unused time credited and the new charge prorated.

The comparison table on the pricing page is the clearest statement of value by tier. Staff users are 1 on Starter, 3 on Publisher, 15 on Business and unlimited on Custom. File uploads are 5 MB, 100 MB, 250 MB and 1 GB. Registered members are 1,000, 1,000, 10,000 and unlimited as the included baseline before the slider raises Publisher and Business. Newsletters are 1, 3, 10 and unlimited, and email sends are unlimited on every plan. Premium tiers are none, 3, 10 and unlimited; special offers none, 15, 50 and unlimited; and paid subscriptions, tips and donations and 0% transaction fees begin at Publisher.

Design and integration features follow the same line. All plans include white-label branding, a free custom domain, internationalisation, design settings, member tagging, import and export, community comments, social web distribution, the Ghost Explore network, recommendations, a referral program, SEO tools, RSS, custom email templates, link editing after sending, managed deliverability, email analytics, signup attribution, embedded media, image editing, Slack and the Content API. Publisher adds marketplace and custom themes, a custom sending domain, advanced native analytics, ad networks, Zapier, n8n, custom integrations, the Admin API and webhooks. Business adds priority support and the option of a custom SSL certificate and a subdirectory install at $50 a month each; Custom includes those plus a dedicated email IP, deliverability consultation, SSO, an account manager, invoice billing and the SLA.

The practical reading is that Starter is a complete free-newsletter-and-blog product for one person under 1,000 readers, and that any publication intending to charge, use its own theme, send from its own domain or automate with the Admin API must start at Publisher. The help centre's members and staff users article adds the counting rules: a member is any sign-up, free or paid, counted once per email address; Contributor-role and suspended staff do not count toward the staff limit, but pending invites do.

Picture a fictional independent newsletter with 800 free subscribers and one writer who wants a website and weekly email. Starter fits: $18 a month, or $180 a year, which is $36 less than twelve monthly payments of $216. The moment the writer wants a paid tier, Starter is out regardless of audience size, because paid subscriptions begin at Publisher. At 800 members Publisher costs $35 monthly or $348 a year, so the price of monetising is $17 a month more than Starter on monthly billing or $168 a year more on yearly.

Now the newsletter grows to 4,000 members, of whom 300 pay $8 a month. On Publisher that is the 5,000-member step at $75 monthly or $756 a year. Revenue is 300 × $8 = $2,400 a month, and Ghost keeps 0% of it; only Stripe's processing fees come off. By comparison our beehiiv vs Substack comparison documents Substack's 10% share, which on the same revenue would be $240 a month, or $2,880 a year, against Ghost's $756 a year on yearly billing, a difference of $2,124 before Stripe fees in Ghost's favour at this scale.

At 12,000 members with the same writer and two editors, the publication hits the 25,000-member step on Publisher at $169 monthly or $1,692 a year with 3 staff users, which is exactly enough; a fourth staff member or a need for 10 newsletters moves it to Business at $319 monthly or $3,192 a year for the same step. If the three-person team had stayed under 10,000 members, Business would have been a flat $239 monthly or $2,388 a year. These are illustrative applications of Ghost's published price data, not quotes, and member counts include free sign-ups.

Ghost's subscription management article states that all new Ghost(Pro) accounts start on a 14-day free trial and will not be billed when the trial expires; to continue, the owner selects a plan and the card on file is billed monthly or annually. Only the site owner can access the Ghost(Pro) Billing area, change plans or update the card, and ownership can be transferred to another staff user if needed. Invoices are downloadable from billing history and can carry an address and tax ID for future payments, though past invoices cannot be altered.

Changing plans or billing frequency takes effect immediately, with unused time on the previous plan credited and the new charge prorated, and the invoice shows both. If a publication grows over its member limit, publishing in Ghost Admin is temporarily disabled and a banner points to the upgrade; publishing and sending resume once the next tier is purchased. This is a different mechanism from the gentle email-first overage policies some analytics tools document, and it means a viral growth week can interrupt a publishing schedule until the owner upgrades.

Cancellation is from the red Cancel account link in Billing, and once cancelled the site and account are deleted at the end of the billing cycle; the auto-renewal article repeats that cancelling auto-renew is the same action. Both articles state, with reference to the terms of service, that Ghost does not offer refunds, and the pause article says there is no way to put an account on hold. Ghost advises exporting content first: the Settings export covers content, tags, staff and settings, while a full archive including images and themes must be requested from support before cancelling. A yearly subscriber who leaves mid-term therefore forfeits the remaining months, which argues for monthly billing in year one as our SaaS spending guide recommends for any no-refund product.

The pricing page lists a free custom domain on every plan. The help centre clarifies what that means: connecting a domain you already own is included, and from the Ghost(Pro) Domain area you can also buy a new domain through GoDaddy with DNS configured automatically; .link domains register free for the first year through a partnership with Entri, while other extensions are paid at checkout and managed in GoDaddy afterwards. Ghost's domain setup guides cover Squarespace, Hover, Namecheap, GoDaddy, Cloudflare and Gandi.

Each Ghost(Pro) subscription hosts exactly one publication. The multiple sites article says a second site with its own domain needs a second account and subscription under a separate email address or alias, and suggests tag archives or content collections for different content types on one site. For an agency or a brand with several properties that is a per-site bill rather than a workspace, which is where Duda and Webflow differ, and the Duda vs Webflow for agencies comparison covers that model.

Managed hosting has boundaries the help centre spells out: third-party CDNs on top of Ghost(Pro) are not supported, there is no FTP or SSH access, and third-party code is uploaded through theme files or code injection instead. Backups are automatic and exports are available any time. Because the software is open source, a publication that needs a CDN of its own, server access or multiple sites under one bill can self-host Ghost, trading the managed updates, security and support for control and a server bill, a route Ghost's own discounts article recommends to budget-constrained organisations.

Against the newsletter platforms, Ghost's documented edge is ownership and the fee model. Our beehiiv vs Substack comparison records Substack's 10% of subscription revenue and sending from substack.com even with a custom web domain, and beehiiv's free tier to 2,500 subscribers with flat paid plans; Ghost charges a flat member-based subscription, keeps 0%, sends from a custom domain on Publisher and above, and gives you a full website rather than a profile page. The trade is that Ghost has no free managed tier and no built-in reader network comparable to Substack's, so discovery depends on your own channels plus Ghost Explore and recommendations.

Against WordPress, Ghost is narrower and faster: memberships, newsletters and SEO are native rather than plugins, but there is no plugin universe, no WooCommerce-style store and one publication per subscription. Against Squarespace, Webflow or Framer, Ghost trades visual design freedom for an editorial workflow; a designer who wants pixel control over marketing pages should look at those builders, as our Squarespace alternatives guide sets out, while a writer who wants to publish and send in one step should look here. For content creators building a stack, the content creator tools guide places Ghost beside the newsletter and analytics tools it most often pairs with.

Because the software is open source, every Ghost(Pro) price has an implicit alternative: run Ghost yourself. Ghost's own discounts article points students, open-source developers and non-profits there, and its documentation covers installation on a server. What self-hosting removes is the member-based ladder; what it adds is a server bill, the responsibility for the weekly updates, SSL, backups, uptime and security that Ghost(Pro) lists on every plan, and the job of configuring an email-sending provider for newsletters, since bulk email is the part of a publishing stack that is hardest to run well.

The documents suggest a simple decision rule. A technical publisher with a large free audience and modest revenue, for whom Publisher's 25,000- or 50,000-member steps at $169 or $249 a month outrun income, has the clearest case for self-hosting. A writer whose time is the scarce resource, or a team that needs the custom sending domain, deliverability management and support that Ghost(Pro) bundles, is paying for operations rather than software, which is also how Ghost funds the open-source project. Either way the export tools and the common codebase mean the choice is reversible, which is rare among the platforms in our website builders roundup.

Choose Ghost(Pro) if you are a writer, newsletter or small editorial team that wants a website and email list on your own domain, intends to sell memberships without giving up a share of revenue, values open-source software you could self-host later, and can live with one publication per subscription. Choose Publisher rather than Starter if you will charge readers, use your own theme or automate anything. Skip it if you need a free managed plan, an ecommerce store, a visual page designer, several sites under one bill, or a refund safety net, and look harder if your free-member count is likely to climb fast, because the price follows total members and publishing pauses when you cross a step.

Trial it with intent. Start the 14-day trial without a card, import your existing posts and subscriber list to see the real member count against the 1,000 and 2,500 steps, connect Stripe in test mode on Publisher to set up a paid tier and an offer, send one newsletter to yourself from a custom sending domain, and try the theme you intend to use. Before day 14 decide on Starter or Publisher and on monthly or yearly billing, remembering that there are no refunds and that upgrades later are prorated. Record the renewal date, the member step you are approaching, and the fact that cancellation deletes the site at cycle end, so you export first.