[johnonolan]

Hi HN, John from Ghost here. Thanks for the comments about 3.0 — we spent a lot of late nights on this, and it's a pretty big upgrade for Ghost as a platform (which is now 6 years old).

I know the audience here is generally more interested in technical details and reasons for why this took longer than 1 weekend to build. So I'll share a few more relevant details absent from the marketing copy:

- The new membership system is effectively just an email database with JWT based authentication. Two cool things about this: You can import any CSV of emails and that's now a user database of people who can log in, and 2: not storing passwords at all is pretty great.

- New billing features are a deep integration w/ Stripe Billing API, which works with your API keys, not via Stripe Connect, so there's no middleman. Ghost can't add any fees on transactions, and volume doesn't flow through our Stripe account in any way - so it remains completely decentralised without a bottleneck. The significant part of that is: If Ghost the company were to ever go away, your site/billing/everything would keep working as normal. Doesn't depend on us.

- All our APIs and Webhooks have been continually improved to the point where Ghost is now the most popular (at least by Github stars, the fruit of life) open source headless CMS out there. Also a new Github Action for CI/CD of Ghost themes makes that whole process a lot less painful

"What's the point of this, why not just use [x]" Because [x] is some combination of: closed source, centralised, written in decade old procedural PHP, or has some sort of UI which no non-developer wants to go anywhere near. We try to sit at the juncture of these things with a decentralised product, easy to run with a managed service, built with tech developers don't hate, and a UI that people who create content really love.

Also: Something about Postgres

On a serious note, thanks for all the support. Ghost launched on HN and it was that initial boost that got everything started. I'll be hanging out in the comments here throughout the day.

[mkr-hn]

Do you have any plans to offer a solo professional type plan? ~$350/year and up is quite a lot more than I can justify for what I would use this for. Something like Automattic's Premium plan ($8/month) for a managed blog with a subscription system like this would be an easy sell for me.

I understand if that's a hard no. You seem to be aiming at people who are or plan to be big time enough to hire people to help. Getting people in who might head that way so they have an easy upgrade path might be good though. If I were the kind of person Patreon's top plan aims at, any Ghost plan would be an easy sell, but even thinking about that is a long way off for me.

[sdan]

Self host it if you can. I do at https://sdan.xyz/blog and https://sdan.xyz/essays and it works flawlessly regardless of visitors/staff members/etc.

Obviously by paying Ghost to host it for you is a bit pricey since they have to make a profit as well, but the amazing thing is that the whole thing is open sourced for people like us to self host (I wrote a post about how I self host a bunch of stuff including ghost: http://sdan.xyz/sd2)

[mkr-hn]

I'd rather pay them to do it. The last time I self-hosted, it was WordPress, and the temptation to tinker was too great and distracted from the actual goal of having a blog.

[WhiteOwlLion]

Ghost used to be available on Softaculous but the requirements changed: https://www.softaculous.com/news/scripts/ghost-support-to-be...

That's likely one of the biggest reasons you can't get a shared host to run this.

WordPress is still installable via Softaculous.

[jhymn]

Then why not Svbtle or Write.as? You have lots of affordable or even free choices.

[mkr-hn]

The subscription system, as I mentioned upthread. Making a blog is easy. Making a blog with pay gated access to posts and downloads is not. The closest equivalent is Patreon + WordPress with the Patreon plugin. I already mentioned the issue with self-hosted WordPress. Managed solutions cost more than Ghost and provide less.

[tyre]

Sounds like a good business opportunity if someone's looking for it.

call it gHosting

[nickpsecurity]

@ mkr-hn

On Lobsters (can't find thread), I mentioned that the price was too high for large amount of potential users, the code was open source, and low-margin providers could host it for the masses on the cheap. If wanting to be ethical, they could even send a percentage of the revenue and/or improvements back to Ghost.

I strongly encourage this model given dominance of sites such as Wordpress. Ghost can keep reaping the benefits of the premium market just publishing source. They can simultaneously stay profitable and democratize the tech through third parties.

[cpr]

Fantastic work, John. I've long wanted to build a web site just to use Ghost. ;-)

If you could figure out some way to integrate tightly with Webflow (the world's best html/css codeless site builder), that would be an absolute killer and I'd be all over it in a second (as would many others).

I suppose the problem there is that Webflow wants to be its own CMS (naturally), but it's somewhat crippled by being a closed solution.

[johnonolan]

I'm a big webflow fan, would love to see if there's some way to use the platforms together :)

[alexktz]

Thank you for all your hard work on Ghost. I've used it for many years now and really like that you ship as a container too.

It's simple, fast, stable and supports pretty much everything I can think of for a writing platform. The changes to theme development are very welcome.

Thanks again to you and the team.

[praveenweb]

> Also: Something about Postgres

Is Ghost bringing back support for Postgres? :)

[yodon]

Is there anything more you've published on the membership system, particularly as it relates to developers?

I often feel like what I need most is an identity system for my users that's nicely coupled to a billing and CMS system, and the CMS providers seem like the ones best equipped to offer that (eg Identity/signin/authorization is really the core poorly addressed problem today).

Shopify has commerce and blogging but wants $10K/yr to let me sign users into my site with user accounts. 8base is doing lots right but hasn't figured out their pricing model ($10/GB/mo for file storage? 500x their cost of goods at S3? What other ways are they planning on reaming me on pricing?). NestJS has all the building blocks but it's just parts. Amplify's integration of AppSync and Cognito is great but billing integration seems surprisingly weak. There are so many who could/should be offering this, but each I dig into just doesn't quite do it.

I'm so hoping I can think about your membership system as a way for me to build sites where my users can easily sign in once to all the site's functionality and commerce without me having to build/maintain/secure my own identity security code.

I get that you're principally a publishing platform, but as you hint at in your posts identity/authorization and billing are key tasks for standing up most any commercial efforts.

[artpi]

I know John's opinion about WordPress, but it sounds like you are looking for Woocommerce.

- Open Source - Thriving plugin ecosystem - WordPress.com can host it for you for $300/year and it will take any traffic you throw at it - It has full advantage of WordPress which is the most popular CMS on the planet

[Malfunction92]

For a second, that "raised 5 mil" line really made me doubt everything I've learned from you guys until I actually read through the post. Congratulations!

[ndarilek]

Haven't looked at Ghost in a while. The subscription system looks neat. I'd recently considered launching an indie game development site for a very niche style of gaming (audio-only) that could probably benefit from a Patreon-style model, but my margins would be so low that the Patreon cut would be hefty for little to no network effect benefit, and I know better than to try rolling my own.

Is there any mechanism for both subscription tiers and pay-what-you-want? So maybe I had a $5 tier and a $10 tier, and if someone wanted to pay $7 then they could and get the $5 benefits?

I'll research this myself when the 3.0 Docker image becomes available, but thought I'd ask first. Not even sure if Stripe supports that functionality, or if it does, how hard it'd be for me to add and contribute back.

Thanks for making Ghost.

[johnonolan]

At the moment we've just got a single plan with either a monthly or yearly price point, and adding support for more flexible subscription options is high on the todo list to work toward next!

[egypturnash]

Ah, this answers the question I had about membership models - I was wondering if it has the option to pay per-thing like Patreon does. ($x per Thing posted, with an optional cap of $y, processed at the end of the month.) Works a lot better for what I do than a flat per-month.

[ndarilek]

Nice, should be good enough for now for me. Is there a GitHub issue or something I can watch for updates?

[nickpsecurity]

I'm curious what Ghost thinks of my proposal here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21330114

I've promoted you in various places as one hell of a positive counter-example to how most companies work. Trying to be fair to Ghost in recommendations about getting more people using the technology.

[2color]

Thanks for building a successful business around an open-source product, this is praise worthy.

Is it possible to generate a static site with Ghost 3.0? or does one have to use gatsby with a headless Ghost 3.0 instance?

[blissofbeing]

The docs page linked in the FAQ is returning a 404: https://ghost.org/docs/members/

[johnonolan]

Seems to be working ok for me, are you still having trouble?

[8458e112e7b2]

Congrats on the release and hope Ghost is even more successful now with all the added features.

Any idea when 3.0 will be available to self-host?

[johnonolan]

It's immediately available to everyone, self hosted and hosted. Source is here: https://github.com/tryghost/ghost

[LaundroMat]

Re: the membership system. How do members authenticate without a password? Is it done by emailing a magic link?

[michaelbrooks]

That's exactly how it's done. :)