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Ghost is what a writer picks who wants Substack's economics without Substack's cut, and it takes nothing from subscription revenue beyond the hosting fee. The editor is quiet and fast, and the whole thing is open source, so a technical creator can host it themselves for the cost of a server. Doing that means you are the support team.
Ghost(Pro) prices on member count. At 1,000 members, Starter is $15 a month billed yearly with one staff user and a custom domain, Publisher is $29 with paid subscriptions, custom themes and 3 staff users, and Business is $199 with 15 users and 10,000 members. The page states no payment fees at any tier. Self-hosting the open source version costs whatever a small server costs, and makes you the support team. Paid subscriptions sitting on the second tier rather than the first is the detail to check against your plans.
A writer with a paid newsletter who has done the arithmetic on Substack's 10 percent. If you have never touched a DNS record and do not intend to, the setup will be the hard part.
Against Substack the maths is simple: Ghost costs a fixed fee and Substack costs 10 percent of everything, so Ghost wins above roughly $300 a month in subscriptions and loses below it. What Substack sells that Ghost cannot is the network that finds you readers.
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