Ghost.org Just Changed Their Tier Pricing For Ghost Pro Hosting

New Pricing Structures On Ghost.org’s Hosted Accounts May Have You Looking For Less Expensive Alternatives

Ghost.org just changed their pricing structure for their hosted plans, otherwise known as Ghost Pro. You are still able to use their CLI integration for free, but unless you have some technical know-how and basic coding skills, you’re likely going to have to use one of their hosted plans.

I noticed this change when logging in to Ghost.org this morning. I was getting ready to write a post when I noticed different pricing on the page. I figured I was seeing this in error, due to their pricing variations based on the number of newsletter subscribers you’re serving, but after logging in it seemed that I was seeing an overhaul to their pricing structure.

I wasn’t able to locate a pre-update pricing summary for Ghost Pro hosting and I don’t have all of the old pricing memorized, but I‘ll do my best to recall and summarize it here (US pricing). If you do see a pricing error, please leave a comment and I’ll do my best to update this article appropriately.

Previous Ghost Pro tiers:

1. Starter — $9/mo if purchased yearly, $11/mo for monthly payments
2. Creator — $24/mo if purchased yearly, $35 for monthly
3. Business — I don’t actually remember the cost associated with this tier as it wasn’t one I was considering (my apologies).
4. Custom — Pricing in this tier was based on need and required contacting Ghost.org

Current Ghost Pro tiers:

1. Starter — $15/mo if purchased yearly, $18/mo for monthly payments
2. Publisher — $29/mo if purchased yearly, $35 for monthly
3. Business — $199/mo if purchased yearly, $239/mo for monthly
4. Custom — Pricing in this tier is still based on need and requires contact with Ghost.org

In addition to the pricing changes, there have also been some structural changes to the quantities of news letter recipients, contributors, and even the themes available on some of the plans.

The most significantly impacted plan was the Starter plan. After this new update, it appears that you can only use the Source theme now. Also, it has almost doubled in price for yearly purchases. Another thing worth mentioning about the new Starter plan is that the number of hosted news letter subscribers has gone up from 500 to 1000, but for most people starting out, this is likely insignificant. Perhaps, most importantly, the Starter tier no longer allows for paid subscriptions on your news letters.

I haven’t studied Ghost Pro’s pricing structures enough to comment on all of the changes that have been made, but I thought that this was worth mentioning here in case you were considering using Ghost.org’s Ghost Pro hosting.

This new pricing structure has me reconsidering how I want to host my blog and newsletter, especially as a new writer that has a very small audience (at least at the time of this writing).

I was going to write primarily on my own website (mrjsn.com hosted on Ghost Pro) and repost relevant stories to Medium. I wanted my audience to have free access to my blog posts, using the mailing list capabilities of Ghost for premium posts and offers.

Now, I may just use some combination of Medium and Substack. I can say that the math has changed for me, being so new, and that I am definitely considering bailing on my plans to use Ghost Pro, at least for now.

What do you think about this new Ghost Pro tiering?

Do you think this restructuring is an overall improvement to the Ghost Pro offerings, or will it drive users away from using Ghost Pro as a hosting service looking for cheaper alternatives?