Ghostly thoughts
So far pretty good here on Ghost. Of course my initial naïve assumptions about it were a bit off. That's OK, it still looks like a pretty comfortable place. Maybe not the luxury castle I thought at first, but surely a modern apartment plenty spacious enough for all of my needs.
When I signed up to Ghost I was on the "ghost PRO" managed hosting trial plan, which may have revealed more options than I'm seeing now. Now I'm on the "Starter (Monthly)" plan which is priced at $18 per month. I can stop anytime I want to. Really, I can.
A quick review of the features after committing to this plan has revealed that this pricing vs value appears to be firmly within the territory of "you get what you pay for". Luckily still in a reasonably generous region of that territory.
Let's talk about what this plan includes. The inclusions of this plan tend to be framed more as limitations. The marketing here is truly compelling. So compelling, to the point that I'm worried about how stable the prices are. But I won't dwell there and will continue forward with the mindset to minimize assuming the worst about pre-enshittified SAAS systems.
And with Ghost, there may be good reason to suspect that enshittification is unlikely as anyone could take a plethora of exit options to easily migrate away from the system. Both the overall architecture and their monetization of managed hosting give me a sense that this thing can be trusted.
Before we talk about the features (or presented limitations) of this starter plan, I think it might be wise to quickly state what Ghost is about. Ghost appears to be framed as a modern subscription blog system. Visitors can subscribe by entering their email, and then the author (here, me) can have the system automatically send them any newly published articles.
In addition to having new articles emailed to them, Subscribers (also referred to as members) may be given the option to comment on articles if the author cares for that to happen.
The shining star feature of this system is for the author: a very beautiful content management system that allows them (me, he) to manage their subscribed members, posts, and a slew of other settings without touching code. The text editor here is just lovely. Everything about this CMS appears to be really frictionless and lovely, in fact.
Now, let's talk about what this ghost pro Starter plan includes, specifically. As stated by the plan page:
Starter
$18/mo
✔️ Your own website
✔️ Custom domain
✔️ Email newsletter
✔️ Simple design settings
✔️ 1,000 members
And while we are at it, I might as well list the other plans for comparison:
Publisher
$35/mo
✔️ 3 staff users
✔️ Custom themes
✔️ 8,000+ integrations
✔️ Paid subscriptions
✔️ Advanced analytics
✔️ 1,000 members
Business
$239/mo
✔️ 15 staff users
✔️ Priority support
✔️ Higher usage limits
✔️ Early access to features
✔️ 10,000 members
You can see that the cost and features escalate pretty quickly. I believe Ghost is not shy in hiding its desire for authors to be directly funded by their readers. To support this statement, we can look to the current heading on the ghost.org website: "Turn your audience into a business."
Nothing wrong with businesses. Nothing wrong with making a living writing or expressing the value of a writer by supporting them each month. This all seems like a fairly fair market.
But being supported by my readers is not why I'm using Ghost to publish content. I'm using it because I like the non-monetizing features here, and they are likely very worth the monthly fee for how I will be using it.
The one glaring limitation for me is the member limit on top of the limited features for removing member sign-up components on this website. I think I've found the combo of settings that minimizes it. If I ever manage more than 1,000 member sign-ups, it appears I can remove them manually. 1,000 current members at any one time who may comment on my nonsense sounds like plenty.
All in all, if ghost pro managed hosting ever isn't worth it, I see plenty of ways out.
I'm still getting used to the whole thing so that's all I have to report for now. Although my initial impression has been brought back down to earth, I'm still impressed with all that is going on here.
Stay tuned.
<3 Grant