Very cool that I can use Ghost as a headless CMS now. Going to have to give it a try.
Ghost 3.0
11–20 of 119 posts
Re: Ghost 3.0
#12Looks great, the payments integration is a great idea.
I've looked at Ghost on and off while considering setting up my personal site, and pricing is the reason I avoided it. I think they started at $5/month for "Ghost Pro" and are now up to $36 for Pro Basic or $99 for Pro Standard (a bit less purchased in bulk). At a minimum, it's now $348/year.
Having paid subscriptions built-in makes that easier to swallow. I don't want any 3rd party ad networks on my site, so subscriptions could help offset the high costs.
Wouldn't help me personally since my site isn't very active and wouldn't get subscribers, but I imagine this will work for some other folks.
Re: Ghost 3.0
#13This article could some background about what Ghost is. There's no explanation until about 6 paragraphs in, and it's only in an image, not in the article itself.
> But you probably want to know about the $5M thing.
No, I'd rather know about what Ghost is :P
Re: Ghost 3.0
#14Another piece of software to nickel-and-dime you. Yay!
Re: Ghost 3.0
#15Hi HN, John from Ghost here. Thanks for the comments about 3.0 — we spent a lot of late nights on this, and it's a pretty big upgrade for Ghost as a platform (which is now 6 years old). I know the audience here is generally more interested in technical details and reasons for why this took longer than 1 weekend to build. So I'll share a few more relevant details absent from the marketing copy: - The new membership sy…
The docs page linked in the FAQ is returning a 404: https://ghost.org/docs/members/
Re: Ghost 3.0
#16This article could some background about what Ghost is. There's no explanation until about 6 paragraphs in, and it's only in an image, not in the article itself. > But you probably want to know about the $5M thing. No, I'd rather know about what Ghost is :P
It's almost like you can chop off the /blog/3-0/ part of the URL and it brings you to a magical homepage that explains exactly that.
Do you really expect them to explain what their software is in every single blog post they make about it?
Re: Ghost 3.0
#17Hi HN, John from Ghost here. Thanks for the comments about 3.0 — we spent a lot of late nights on this, and it's a pretty big upgrade for Ghost as a platform (which is now 6 years old). I know the audience here is generally more interested in technical details and reasons for why this took longer than 1 weekend to build. So I'll share a few more relevant details absent from the marketing copy: - The new membership sy…
The docs page linked in the FAQ is returning a 404: https://ghost.org/docs/members/
Seems to be working ok for me, are you still having trouble?
Re: Ghost 3.0
#18Serious question. In the article it writes "all whilst operating as an independent non-profit organisation releasing open source software.". But this is right before talking about generating $5,000,000 in customer revenue and giving away 0% of the business. So when you're a non-profit, what happens with that $5,000,000 of business generated revenue? How much of a salary do you give yourself? Can you even give yoursel…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nonprofit_organization
"A nonprofit organization, also known as a non-business entity,[1] not-for-profit organization,[2] or nonprofit institution,[3] is dedicated to furthering a particular social cause or advocating for a shared point of view. In economic terms, it is an organization that uses its surplus of the revenues to further achieve its ultimate objective, rather than distributing its income to the organization's shareholders, leaders, or members. Nonprofits are tax exempt or charitable, meaning they do not pay income tax on the money that they receive for their organization. They can operate in religious, scientific, research, or educational settings.""
Re: Ghost 3.0
#19Hi HN, John from Ghost here. Thanks for the comments about 3.0 — we spent a lot of late nights on this, and it's a pretty big upgrade for Ghost as a platform (which is now 6 years old). I know the audience here is generally more interested in technical details and reasons for why this took longer than 1 weekend to build. So I'll share a few more relevant details absent from the marketing copy: - The new membership sy…
Is there anything more you've published on the membership system, particularly as it relates to developers?
I often feel like what I need most is an identity system for my users that's nicely coupled to a billing and CMS system, and the CMS providers seem like the ones best equipped to offer that (eg Identity/signin/authorization is really the core poorly addressed problem today).
Shopify has commerce and blogging but wants $10K/yr to let me sign users into my site with user accounts. 8base is doing lots right but hasn't figured out their pricing model ($10/GB/mo for file storage? 500x their cost of goods at S3? What other ways are they planning on reaming me on pricing?). NestJS has all the building blocks but it's just parts. Amplify's integration of AppSync and Cognito is great but billing integration seems surprisingly weak. There are so many who could/should be offering this, but each I dig into just doesn't quite do it.
I'm so hoping I can think about your membership system as a way for me to build sites where my users can easily sign in once to all the site's functionality and commerce without me having to build/maintain/secure my own identity security code.
I get that you're principally a publishing platform, but as you hint at in your posts identity/authorization and billing are key tasks for standing up most any commercial efforts.
Re: Ghost 3.0
#20Serious question. In the article it writes "all whilst operating as an independent non-profit organisation releasing open source software.". But this is right before talking about generating $5,000,000 in customer revenue and giving away 0% of the business. So when you're a non-profit, what happens with that $5,000,000 of business generated revenue? How much of a salary do you give yourself? Can you even give yoursel…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nonprofit_organization "A nonprofit organization, also known as a non-business entity,[1] not-for-profit organization,[2] or nonprofit institution,[3] is dedicated to furthering a particular social cause or advocating for a shared point of view. In economic terms, it is an organization that uses its surplus of the revenues to further achieve its ultimate objective, rather than distributi…
That's still very confusing.
Surplus sounds like anything beyond hosting costs to run the service, but the hosting costs is likely no where near 5 million dollars so a majority of it is surplus.
Does that mean no one gets a salary or is a salary part of the costs to run the business instead of being a "member"? If salaries are included who dictates what the income tax exempt salary is?
I'm not trolling either. What you're describing sounds like a way to run a business where you can avoid paying income tax while still getting a salary because realistically I doubt the creator of Ghost is living in a homeless shelter and working off public library computers.