r/Ghost

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.

Hey r/Ghost 👋

We just released Essence. It's a simple Ghost blog theme: homepage is a post feed, and most of the personality comes from the visuals.

- Liquid Glass post cards

- Animated Shader backgrounds (lots of presets)

- Sidebar navigation

No landing page builder. No portfolio layout. Just a feed that looks good.

Demo: https://essence.priority.vision/

Details: https://www.priority.vision/themes/essence/

Happy to answer questions.

P.S. Liquid Glass currently only works in Chromium (Chrome, Edge, Brave…). Safari/Firefox get a glass fallback instead. Open the demo in Chrome if you want the real refraction.

For my whole career, Wordpress was the no brainer CMS I would be using for all my projects.

Even when Wordpress would proved to be too slow, I would make sure to use Wordpress as a headless CMS with a NextJS app on the front end.

The plugins and the fact that all freelancers and marketers knows Wordpress was making it a no brainer...

That was true until I launched my last website on Ghost, which is requires more work to customize, but is so much faster both on the front end and the CMS side...

And when I need to customize it, my friend Claude is always there to help, even if it is still more cumbersome then just installing a plugin and calling it a day.

And as better models comes along, the ease of building on Wordpress is fading, and to some extent, the importance of SEO optimization is decreazing as we enter in a zero click world...

So, if you had to start a website from scratch today (not a migration, a new site), what would you build it on?

Personally, I would not go back to Wordpress. I probably would use Ghost, but could go entirely vibe for a small campaign website.

Your coding agent implements a full Ghost blog in your Next.js site:

- posts, tags and author pages
- SEO and sitemap built in
- updates live the moment you hit publish
- Ghost cards that render properly

nstall:

npx skills add kasuncfdo/ghost-headless-blog-skill

Or as a Claude Code plugin:

/plugin marketplace add kasuncfdo/ghost-headless-blog-skill

It also debugs existing integrations: empty blog, stale pages, broken images/cards.

https://github.com/kasuncfdo/ghost-headless-blog-skill