[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

[sdan]

Sounds like an interesting idea... selling software under the MIT license which the software holder is maintaining...

Looks like I have a weekend project now!

[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.