Ghost
Open source publishing software with built in membership and newsletters, self-hosted free or available hosted.
- Price
- Self-hosting the open source version is free. Ghost Pro hosting runs $18 a month for Starter up to $199 for Business.
- Delivery Model
- Open source software, self-hosted free or available as official hosting
- Who It Fits
- Clients whose marketing really is writing and a mailing list
- What You Own
- Everything on the self-hosted version. Content exports from the hosted version
- If You Stop Paying
- Self-hosted keeps running. Hosted stops when the plan does
- Cost Shape
- Free self-hosted plus your hosting, or a subscription for official hosting
Same software either way. You are paying Ghost Pro for the hosting and the updates, not for the product.
Ghost is a publishing system with a paid newsletter attached, and it is very good at being exactly that. If your client is a writer, a publication or a business whose marketing is built on sending email, it does the whole job in one place.
It is open source, so you can run it on your own server for free, and there is also an official hosted version if you would rather not. Both are real options and the same software underneath.
Where it stops being the answer is anything that is not mostly writing. A local service business with ten pages and a booking form is not a publishing problem, and Ghost will feel like the wrong shape immediately.
So this is a narrow recommendation rather than a general one. Keep it on the list for the one client in five whose business really is their mailing list.
Current terms and features: ghost.org/ · Price read from ghost.org/pricing/