Ghost Pricing: Ghost(Pro) Plans vs Self-Hosting

Ghost(Pro) has four plans — Starter, Publisher, Business, and Custom — and every price on Ghost's pricing page scales with how many members your publication has, so there's no one number that answers "what does Ghost cost." At the entry member tier the page shows by default, yearly billing puts Starter at $18 USD/mo, Publisher at $29 USD/mo, and Business at $199 USD/mo (Ghost, Pricing, checked September 2026). Add members and every one of those numbers goes up. Here's what each plan actually unlocks, and what self-hosting costs if you'd rather run the software yourself.

What does each Ghost(Pro) plan unlock?

The four plans aren't just a price ladder — each one gates specific features, per Ghost's own pricing page (checked September 2026, at the entry member tier described above):

Starter is the plan for a solo blog or newsletter with no monetization plan yet — it includes your own site and an email newsletter, but it has no paid-subscription capability at all, so if charging readers is even a maybe, Starter isn't the plan to build on. Publisher is where a real publication starts: it adds paid subscriptions at a 0% platform transaction fee, plus marketplace and custom themes and the "8,000+ integrations" Ghost's page lists — a jump from 1 to 3 staff users as well. Business raises the ceilings rather than adding new capability categories: 15 staff users and a 10,000-member cap, plus priority support and early feature access. Custom removes the caps entirely — unlimited staff users, unlimited members, and Ghost's page describes advanced configuration options and a 99.9% uptime SLA for organizations that need it, priced on request rather than shown on the page.

Why does the price change if I add more members?

Because member count is the actual pricing variable Ghost bills on, not a side detail. Ghost's pricing page uses a member-count selector, and every plan's displayed price moves with it — the $18/$29/$199 (yearly) figures above are only accurate at the lowest member count the page offers, which starts near zero. Move the selector up and the same three plan names show higher prices. That's why the numbers in this guide are tied to one specific, stated point on the page rather than presented as "the" Ghost(Pro) price — check the live pricing page with your own approximate member count before budgeting, since a publication with an established list will pay more than the entry-tier figures above.

What does self-hosting Ghost cost instead?

Self-hosting is free software, but it isn't free to run. Ghost's own hosting-comparison page breaks self-hosting costs into separate line items rather than one bundled price, each shown as a starting figure: base hosting "From $10*/mo," a global CDN and WAF "From $20*/mo," email newsletter delivery "From $15*/mo," an analytics platform "From $10*/mo," full site backups "From $5*/mo," and an image editor "From $12*/mo" (Ghost Developer Docs, "Hosting", checked September 2026). Add the base hosting line to any of the others you actually need, and a self-hosted setup covering CDN, email delivery, analytics, and backups lands somewhere in the neighborhood of $50-plus a month before you've matched everything Ghost(Pro) bundles in automatically — and that's before your own time spent managing the server.

The same hosting-comparison page separately states a Ghost(Pro) starting cost of "From $15*/mo," a simplified comparison figure Ghost uses on that specific page — it's lower than the $18 entry-tier Starter price shown on the live pricing page above, so treat the two as answers to slightly different questions (a rough hosting-comparison baseline versus the actual current plan price) rather than the same number restated twice. What the comparison page is clear about is feature parity: it rates "Product features" as "Identical" between Ghost(Pro) and self-hosting the same open-source software — the difference is entirely about who manages the server, CDN, email delivery, analytics, and backups, not which features the software itself has.

Which is cheaper, Ghost(Pro) or self-hosting?

It depends on what you already have. If you don't want to manage a server, a CDN, transactional email delivery, or backups yourself, Ghost(Pro)'s bundled price is doing real work for you — those are each separate paid line items on the self-hosted side. If you already run infrastructure, have email deliverability sorted, and are comfortable configuring backups and a CDN yourself, self-hosting's base "From $10*/mo" undercuts Ghost(Pro)'s entry tier, and the software itself carries no subscription cost either way — Ghost's own comparison confirms the platform features are identical, so you're not paying more on Ghost(Pro) for a better product, only for someone else to run it.

One cost is identical regardless of which you choose: the 0% transaction fee on paid subscriptions applies the same way to Publisher-and-above Ghost(Pro) plans and to self-hosted Ghost, since it's the same underlying software and Stripe integration in both cases — your only payment cost either way is whatever Stripe itself charges for processing.

Which plan should I actually pick?

• Pick Starter only if you're not planning to charge for subscriptions soon — it has no paid-subscription capability at all, so revisit this the moment monetization becomes a real plan rather than a someday idea.
• Pick Publisher the moment paid subscriptions, custom themes, or a second staff account become real needs — it's the plan where Ghost's core publishing-plus-membership model actually turns on.
• Pick Business once your member count or staff count outgrows Publisher's caps, or you need priority support.
• Talk to Ghost's sales team about Custom if you need unlimited members or staff, or the uptime SLA that Custom includes and the other tiers don't mention.
• Self-host if you already run infrastructure and are comfortable sourcing your own CDN, email delivery, analytics, and backups instead of paying Ghost(Pro) to bundle them.

Re-check Ghost's pricing page at your actual or projected member count before committing to a year of billing — the entry-tier numbers in this guide will understate what an established list costs.

Where does Figment fit in?

Nowhere directly — Figment publishes a website from a Figma design through its Figma plugin; it has no member system, paid-subscription tooling, or newsletter delivery of its own to compare against Ghost's plans. If a newsletter with paid members is the actual job, Ghost(Pro) or self-hosted Ghost is the right comparison, not Figment. For how Ghost stacks up against Substack or WordPress on ownership, fees, and export — questions this pricing-focused guide doesn't repeat — see our Ghost vs Substack and Ghost vs WordPress comparisons.

Bottom line: Ghost(Pro)'s four plans — Starter, Publisher, Business, Custom — gate paid subscriptions, themes, staff seats, and member caps, and every price scales with your member count rather than sitting fixed. At the entry tier, Publisher is the plan that actually turns on monetization; self-hosting undercuts Ghost(Pro)'s base price but adds separate costs for the CDN, email, analytics, and backups it doesn't bundle in.