Ghost
Indie subscription platform for creators
Hey IndieHackers 👋 It's been 9 years since the first version of Ghost launched on Kickstarter and today we're excited to launch the 5th major version of the platform.
Around this time last year, we launched the first public version of Ghost with memberships and subscriptions built-in natively. Ever since then, we've been sprinting to keep up with demand as the creator economy has taken off at full-tilt.
So, the major focus of this release has been expanding on that core foundation and delivering a set of features to help creators build successful indie businesses themselves.
You can click through to the post if you want the full run-down, but here's a quick overview of what's new:
📬 Ghost can now run multiple newsletters for different types of content, each with their own sender names, branding and subscription lists.
📈 We completely overhauled the dashboard to make it more powerful, with revenue, engagement and native email stats, at a glance.
💰 Custom subscription tiers make it possible to offer your audience more ways to become paid subscribers, and a native offers feature allows you to grow your revenue (still with 0% payment fees).
✍️ A host of new cards in the Ghost editor allow publishers to add GIFs, call outs, toggles, products, videos, audio, and much more to their content.
💅 We've released several official new open source themes and introduced new ways to customise brand settings for websites and newsletters, directly inside Ghost Admin.
➕ Plus, brand new developer tutorials, performance improvements, and much more
Full changelog here:
https://ghost.org/changelog/5/
I also spent a bit of time in the post above talking about our product strategy as a self-funded indie company, which has certainly been pretty different to all our funded competitors. Back when we first started working on memberships in Ghost, we were a team of 5 with $36k MRR trying to figure out how to realise our dreams.
Today Ghost is a team of 31 with $5M annual revenue. Still completely open source, still non-profit, still remote, still decentralised, still growing — and still 100% independent.
A new business model for publishing, a more powerful headless CMS and a refined publishing experience.
Ghost is about 6 years old now, and this is the biggest release we've done since the original launch. The company is structured as an Indie Non-profit organisation, and everything we do is released as open source.
3.0 is a big step in a new direction for us, enabling indie publishing businesses to be created with a really easy way to spin up a recurring revenue members website using stripe — and it's open source, so you own every part of it. This may come in handy for indie makers who are looking to launch an MVP with simple billing without having to build a whole platform, too :)
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You guys are doing incredible work (I recently enjoyed taking part in a Ghostathon here in Melbourne). Despite having used Wordpress over the last 9 years to slowly grow geekymedics.com to over 1.5 million views a month, Ghost's new membership functionality has me contemplating the big switch! Very exciting stuff guys!
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Glad to hear it! Really appreciate the kind words :)
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Ghost 3.0 is so awesome, I'm just starting to build a theme for it.
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This is just too awesome!!!!
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Ive been using Ghost on sysadmins.co.za for about 3 years now. Absolutely amazing. And super stoked for v3
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Keep fighting the good fight @johnonolan
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It looks awesome John, I keep fingers crossed for Ghost. Thanks for sharing! :)
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Here’s a great interview Ben Thompson did with @johnonolan about Ghost 3.0.
https://stratechery.com/2019/ghost-3-0-an-interview-with-ghost-ceo-john-onolan/
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This is awesome, so excited to hear this news! I use Ghost for work and love the platform.
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I've never used Ghost, but when I need a cms platform, I'll be giving it a try. Nice to see it progressing.
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I have been using Ghost for about 3 months & I love it.
One challenge I face is building the subscriber base which consists of a niche audience interested in data science, economics & tech. Would be nice if Ghost could introduce something like a community platform where people could just browse & check out all sites running on Ghost Pro, sorted by category: @johnonolan. Will just help ppl build their publications faster! -
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I love Ghost!
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Using Ghost for my work at the moment and found it to be one of the best sites for blogging
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I have used 1.0 version engine for my first blog, it was an incredible experience. I'm really happy to see you guys achieve so much since then.
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Boy am I surprised to log in here and see this post. :)
Been using Ghost since about 2015 for https://shainabrown.com and my company blog: https://blog.quenk.com . I can't lie, the reduced features compared to a traditional CMS has been a stumbling block for me but Ghost's simplicity makes it a joy to log into and use.
You don't get burned out by having to navigate a bunch of menus and plugins that lack cohesiveness. I think niche CMSes needs to become the new norm.
I also really appreciate it being available as I work mostly in Node.js environments.
Congrats and keep up the great work!
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Great tools, I have used it to build my content website.
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I've never heard about Ghost! Thx for sharing!
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Website states it's open source but there is a monthly subscription cost. Open source should be free software, right? I am confused :/
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Hey, not exactly! Open source means the source code for the project is on the open for everyone to see and contribute. Which means you are free to take the code, host it on your own infrastructure and serve your blog from there, free of charge!
The monthly subscription they offer is for you to run your blog on Ghosts infrastructure, meaning you just have to press a few buttons, and you have a blog for the world to read.
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Thanks orgmir for explaining this, that makes sense.
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11 Comments
Man I can’t wait until my platform gets lunched and one day get to tell these stories!
Been a long-time user of Ghost. Actually started getting some MRR last year on my blog :) Looking forward to checking out Ghost v5.
Have you used WordPress? I wants to know why there's need to use Ghost instead of building own, independently managed blog.
It's a great project and I love the stack they used for development.
that new dashboard!!!! love.
Cheers Andrew ✌️
What made you choose ember?
I loved ghost and have been using it since 2016.
Congrats John and team!
Is the upgrade seemless with docker? (assuming that I'm using the latest 4.8.0 version).
PS. congrats!
Docker images are community-maintained, but I believe already updated for 5.0
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