u/Nuenni

PayGlue connects payment providers other than Stripe to Ghost CMS. A customer pays, PayGlue calls the Ghost Admin API and gives them access. When the subscription ends, PayGlue takes it away again.

https://payglue.io

Ghost only ships a native Stripe integration. That’s fine until Stripe isn’t available in your country, or you want a Merchant of Record so you’re not the one filing VAT, or you sell a one-time product instead of a subscription. Then you’re on your own.

The usual answer is n8n. Zapier and Make work too. I ran that setup for a while and the happy path was never the problem. It was everything else. Refunds. Failed payments. Someone upgrading mid-cycle. Someone paying twice because the first checkout timed out. Each of those is a branch you build yourself and then have to remember exists six months later. Mine looked healthy for weeks, and then a customer emailed me asking why he’d been locked out of the thing he had just paid for.

Two things I adress here directly:
First, the pricing. 9 € once to lock in 4 €/mo for life, entry price goes up in steps, regular price at public launch is 59 €/mo. To me it reads as an honest early-stage deal. It could just as easily read as a founder who has no idea what his own product is worth.

Second, the Ghost angle. Somebody is going to tell me this belongs in Ghost core and that I’m renting time until they build it. I’ve talked to the Ghost Foundation, the conversation was friendly, and I still don’t know how to read that.

Tell me where this falls apart. The page, the price, the idea itself.

PS: Core is open source under BUSL 1.1, so you can self-host it for free. So you don’t have to trust me and my own eu infrastructure.

If you've ever manually granted a Ghost membership because someone paid you through PayPal or Ko-fi, you know why I built this. Same if you've ever found out weeks later that a cancelled subscriber still had full access because nobody revoked it.

Ghost has one native payment integration, Stripe, and that's it. Everything else your audience might actually pay with means syncing members by hand or duct-taping webhooks via zapier, make or n8n together yourself. I did the duct tape version for a while myself with n8n. Then I built PayGlue, a relay between your payment provider and Ghost that grants access on payment and revokes it on cancellation, automatically. No code on your end.

As of today it's in open beta. The waitlist is gone, you can just sign up, connect your Ghost site and a provider, and sync is running a few minutes later.

Currently live: Polar, Lemon Squeezy, PayPal, Gumroad, Paddle, Ko-fi, Creem, and Patreon. Your existing Stripe setup doesn't change at all. PayGlue runs next to it and only covers what Ghost can't do natively, like one-time purchases, pay-what-you-want, or providers Ghost simply doesn't know.

The closed beta took four months, and honestly most of that was waiting. Memberships don't renew on the same day, so every provider had to survive real billing cycles on a real Ghost site, renewals, cancellations, refunds, before I'd let it near anyone's paying members. All eight have been through that now. Slow, but I wouldn't want anyone moving faster with my members either.

One thing from today I'm still a bit giddy about: doors opened this afternoon, and at 05:37 the first paying customer came in. One person, sure. After four months of being my own only tenant though, I stared at that notification for a while.

Everything's open source (BUSL 1.1) and self-hosting stays free, code's on GitHub if you'd rather run it on your own infrastructure next to Ghost. You don't need to trust me. The hosted version has working checkout now, founding tier starts at 9€ and locks a reduced rate for life once regular pricing kicks in.

If a provider you need is missing, tell me which one. Crypto Payments, EU Providers, Whop and Hotmart are next in line, but that's not set in stone.

https://payglue.io

Happy to answer anything here, setup questions, edge cases, self-hosting, or "why would I not just keep doing this manually." Especially that last one, honestly.

Ghost CMS has one native payment integration and it's Stripe. If your audience pays through Polar, PayPal, Ko-fi, Gumroad, Patreon, or anything else, Ghost has no idea it happened. I've watched people run member access off a spreadsheet. I've also watched people not run it at all, where cancelled subscribers keep reading paid posts for months because nobody caught it.

So I built PayGlue. It sits between the provider and Ghost, grants the membership when someone pays, revokes it when they cancel. Set up once, no code.

The one design choice I'd defend to anyone: Ghost's native Stripe integration stays completely untouched. PayGlue runs alongside it, never replaces it. Nobody wants to migrate a billing setup that already works, and I didn't want to be the person asking them to.

It's open source (BUSL 1.1) and self-hosting is free. I shipped that before I had a single paying user. Sounds principled, was mostly practical. "Trust me, I never touch your payment data" is a claim, and a public repo is proof.

Solo founder, EU infrastructure, built with heavy use of Claude Code.

Closed beta ended today and anyone can sign up now. Timing was kind to me: the first paying customer showed up a few hours after I opened the doors, which after four months alone felt pretty good. Founding tier is 9€ for the early rate, or self-host for nothing.

https://payglue.io

If you've ever wired payments into a CMS by hand (i did before with n8n), I'd like to hear how far you got before something broke.

Back in March I stopped coding to launch a waitlist first. Felt backwards. You're meant to build the thing and then go find people, and I did it the other way round because I wanted to know if the pitch even landed before I spent months over-building.

Today I deleted the waitlist page. A few hours later, 17:37, someone paid.

First paying customer, four months in. Came through Creem, which I use as my Merchant of Record, so it's actually visible on my public Creem profile. Real money, real person. Took me a second to believe it wasn't a test charge I'd forgotten I set up.

I'm a bit stunned, honestly. You build alone for months and you keep telling yourself the waitlist means something, but there's a real gap between people saying they're interested and one person actually moving money. That gap closed this afternoon and it feels different from the other side than I expected.

The four months in between, quickly: first real tenant live in production in June, went from one supported payment provider to eight, open sourced the entire codebase before I had any revenue (BUSL 1.1, self-hosting free), and a lot of unglamorous trust work nobody upvotes, DPA, sub-processor list, security manifest.

The product is PayGlue, middleware between Ghost CMS and payment providers beyond Stripe. Someone pays through their provider, PayGlue grants the Ghost membership. Someone cancels, it revokes access. No code, no spreadsheet.

Staying honest since this is the sub for it: it's one customer. One. Not a chart, not a trend, not "creators trust us." But it's the one that flips the question from "will anyone pay" to "someone did," and I'm properly grateful to whoever hit buy at 17:37. Founding tier's at 9€ if anyone else wants in early.

https://payglue.io

Solo, EU infra, built with a lot of Claude Code. Ask me anything about launching the waitlist before the product, I very much have feelings about it today, and will now open a beer ;-)

Curious what's still eating up time for people here. Not the obvious stuff like email or calendars, but the weird manual workarounds you've built for yourself because no tool quite does it. Mine is webhook/payment relay stuff for a CMS I use, what's yours?

Ghost has the best writing experience of any CMS I've used. Clean, fast, no bloat. The membership and newsletter system is genuinely good.

But there is one thing that has always bothered me. If you want paid memberships, Ghost expects Stripe. Not because there are no alternatives, but because nobody built the bridge yet.

I got tired of waiting and built it myself. A small relay layer called GhostGlue that sits between your payment provider and Ghost. Buy on Polar, become a Ghost member. No Stripe required.

Still early, but it works. Curious if other Ghost or headless CMS users have found creative ways around native payment limitations.

Hey fellow Ghosty's,

I've been running Ghost publications for a few years. Love the editor, love the membership model, love that it's not ad-supported.

But every time I wanted to experiment with how I monetize, I hit the same wall. Ghost memberships work great if you use Stripe. If you don't, you're basically on your own.

I spent a while trying to solve it with Zapier and Make. It works, until it doesn't. A webhook fails at midnight, a membership doesn't activate, and you find out the next morning when someone emails you.

So I built a small relay layer for myself. Something that listens for a purchase event from a provider like Polar and updates the Ghost membership on the other side. No drama, just plumbing.

That personal fix has slowly grown into something a bit bigger. I ended up calling it GhostGlue.

Still very early, and I'm still building. But it's already solving the exact problem that made me start it, and a few other Ghost publishers are running it too.

Curious if anyone here has run into the same wall, or found a solution I haven't seen yet.

I run a few Ghost publications. Love the product. But for paid memberships, Ghost basically assumes you use Stripe, and I never wanted to be locked into a single payment provider.

I looked at the usual options. Zapier, Make, n8n. They work, but every setup felt like something I'd eventually have to debug at 2am when a webhook fails and someone's membership doesn't activate.

So I started building a small relay layer. Not a product, just a fix for myself. Something that receives a purchase event from a provider like Polar, and updates the Ghost membership on the other side.

That small fix is now a little bit bigger and called GhostGlue.

It's still early. Polar is running in production, webhook retry and replay works, and a handful of other Ghost publishers are using it. We're taking on a small batch of founding members while i keep building.

What I didn't expect: a lot of Ghost users I've talked to have the same frustration but just assumed there was no alternative to the Stripe-only path and som eold "howto's" in forums exm. Paypal donation button + zapier.

What I didn't expect: the technical part was straightforward compared to figuring out whether this is a real problem for more than just me.

Still figuring that out. But shipping weekly and talking to users is the only way I know how to get there.

Happy to answer questions about the stack or the decisions along the way.

PS: Feedback for the landingpage is welcome too 😄

Cheers fellow builders!

---
Stack:

• Frontend: Vue 3 + TypeScript, Vite, Tailwind CSS, deployed on Cloudflare Pages
• Backend: Django (Python), deployed on Railway
• Database + Auth: Supabase (Postgres, Magic Link auth, Edge Functions on Deno)
• Webhook relay: Supabase Edge Functions
• Bot protection: Cloudflare Turnstile
• Email: Brevo (transactional)
• Payments: Polar (live), Lemon Squeezy + Stripe (in deployment), PayPal, Paddle, Gumroad (planned)
• CMS integration: Ghost via Content API + Admin API
• Infrastructure: Cloudflare (DNS, Pages, Workers), Railway, Supabase

Open source: Yes, planned after the core is stable. The goal is full self-hostability with a hosted option on top.