Ghost Pricing: What You Will Pay to Run Your Publication in 2025

Picking a content management system isn’t just about features—it’s about figuring out what you’ll actually pay, month after month. Ghost has carved out a pretty specific spot for itself: faster than WordPress, more flexible than Substack, and built for people who care about owning their content. 

Ghost offers managed hosting through Ghost(Pro) with pricing that scales based on audience size and features needed, but here’s the thing—they don’t take a cut of what you make.

This guide breaks down what Ghost costs, where the value sits, and whether it makes sense for your situation. Whether you’re launching your first newsletter or running a small media operation, the pricing is pretty straightforward once you understand how it works.

Ghost Pricing Overview

Ghost(Pro) has four pricing tiers that basically match where you are as a creator. The big difference from something like Substack? Ghost charges a flat monthly fee and takes 0% of your earnings. You keep everything you make. 

The price changes based on two things: how many people are on your team, and how many members you have. Most plans start at 1,000 members, then scale up from there.

What you’re paying for is hosting, automatic updates, security, and a content delivery network that makes your site load fast everywhere. Ghost Pro handles all the technical stuff—server maintenance, backups, security patches—so you don’t have to. For a lot of creators, that’s worth the price just to avoid dealing with servers. 

Plus, it’s open source. You’re never locked in. Export everything and leave if you want.

Ghost Monthly Pricing

Ghost pushes annual billing pretty hard, but you can pay monthly if you need flexibility. The yearly option saves you a decent chunk. Starter is $15/month yearly versus $18 monthly, Publisher is $29 versus $35. That’s roughly 17-20% off, which adds up if you’re planning to stick around.

Monthly billing makes sense if you’re testing Ghost out. But if you commit annually, you’re saving anywhere from $36 to $480, depending on your plan. That money could go toward a custom theme, ads, or just better coffee while you write. Right now, Ghost is also running promotional pricing with discounts for the first three months, so new signups get a bit of breathing room.

Ghost Monthly Plans

Each tier is designed for a different stage. Solo blogger? Small team? Growing publication? Here’s how they stack up.

Main Plans Comparison

Starter Plan

Starter is aimed at solo creators and small newsletters—$15/month annually gets you 1,000 members, a custom domain, and email newsletters. You get the basics: your own site, simple design tools, and a 5MB upload limit. It’s enough to get going if you’re just publishing and building an audience.

But there are real limits here. Recent updates stripped out paid subscriptions from Starter and locked you into one theme only. That’s a big step back. You also can’t add collaborators—just one user. If you’re planning to make money from memberships or work with an editor, you’ll hit the ceiling fast. 

Publisher Plan

Publisher costs $29/month on annual billing and opens up paid subscriptions, custom themes, 8,000+ integrations, and proper analytics. You get three staff accounts, so you can actually work with a team. This is where Ghost starts making sense for monetization. You can set up membership tiers, lock content behind paywalls, and keep free stuff public.

The analytics here go deeper—email performance, subscriber behavior, where your signups come from. That’s useful if you’re trying to figure out what’s working. The integration list is massive too, so you can hook Ghost into automation tools, social platforms, whatever. Here’s the math that matters: 

Ghost doesn’t take a cut of your revenue, but Substack takes 10%. If you’re making $3,000/month from subscribers, you save $360/month just by not using Substack. Publisher pays for itself pretty fast.

Business Plan

Business is $199/month annually, built for teams scaling up—15 staff users, priority support, higher limits. This is for established publications or media companies that need more horsepower. Priority support means when something breaks, you’re not waiting around. You also get early access to new features before they roll out to everyone else.

The “higher limits” part isn’t spelled out clearly, but it’s built to handle serious traffic without sweating. Ghost Business gives you everything in one package for $199. If you’ve got multiple people publishing daily and real revenue coming in, this tier makes sense.

Oh, they also have an Enterprise plan with all the custom limits and prices; you just gotta contact them with your details.

Ghost Pay-as-you-go Plan

Ghost doesn’t really do pay-as-you-go like email platforms do. You’re on a subscription, period. Costs scale with your member count, not how many emails you send or how much bandwidth you use. But it’s worth knowing how pricing changes when you grow.

Once you pass 1,000 subscribers, the next jump is 3,000 subscribers at $50/month. It keeps climbing from there based on audience size. That’s different from Sender (which charges by email volume) or Substack (which just takes a percentage no matter what). 

Ghost’s model rewards smaller, engaged audiences over huge, passive ones. If you’ve got 800 paying members at $10/month, that’s $8,000 in revenue. You’re paying Ghost $29/month and keeping 99.6%. On Substack? You’d lose $800/month.

The other nice thing: Ghost doesn’t charge extra if you get a traffic spike or something goes viral—they just ask you to upgrade if it happens three months in a row. No surprise bills.

Pay-as-you-go Comparison

Ghost Transactional Emails Pricing

Ghost(Pro) plans include email newsletters without charging per email. All your transactional stuff—signup confirmations, password resets, membership updates—is baked into the monthly price. You don’t have to count emails or worry about overage charges.

If you self-host Ghost, it’s different. You’ll need something like Mailgun, which runs about $35/month for 50,000 emails. That handles both transactional emails and newsletters, but you have to set it up yourself. Self-hosting only makes sense if you’re comfortable with that stuff or sending a ton of emails.

Ghost SMS Pricing

Ghost doesn’t do SMS at all—not in any plan. It’s focused on web publishing, email newsletters, and memberships. If you need text messages, you have to wire in something like Twilio separately, which runs on its own pricing.

That’s a gap if you’re into SMS marketing. Sender has SMS built in with pay-as-you-go credits, so you’re covered there. But honestly, most Ghost users don’t care. Bloggers, journalists, newsletter writers—they’re using web and email. SMS just isn’t part of the workflow.

If multichannel is critical for you, you’ll have to decide: does Ghost’s strength in publishing and zero-commission monetization outweigh the SMS thing? Or do you need a platform that does everything, even if it costs more or takes a cut?