Are there any plans or possibilities to allow a minimum tier such as ($1 a month), but allow them to select how much they would like to pay above and beyond, or even a one-time payment?
[I don’t work for Ghost, and this advice may be worth exactly what you paid me for it: $0]
One time payments are supported already. See Tips & Donations
There’s no creation of a subscription or member for one-time payments. You could set it up with Zapier or another automation tool if desired.
Ghost doesn’t support pay-what-you-like-subscriptions. Neither does Stripe, although Stripe is not bothered at all by having lots of prices in the system, or by subscriptions that have quantities. (Platforms that use Stripe and allow pay-what-you-want for subscriptions are actually making an API call to Stripe to create a new price as needed.)
So… you could make lots of different subscription tiers at different prices within Ghost, and website visitors would hopefully find one that matches what they want to pay. [Check how many tiers your plan supports before proceeding with this.]
[Caution: This behavior is not directly supported by Ghost. Use at your own risk.] You could also set up a subscription in Stripe directly, and then link to it. Stripe can be set up to let someone increase the quantity of the subscription (although not change the price – but that’s functionally the same thing.) That’s what I’m doing here:
Interestingly, Stripe will notify Ghost of the new subscription, and Ghost will create the member (or upgrade them if the email matches) and put them on the first paid tier. Again, this is probably unintended/unsupported behavior.
You can encourage users to send tips and then send them a link to claim a tier as a gratitude. Since Stripe will capture that individuals contribution anyways. If you have n8n, you can automate this behavior as well..
This is exactly the problem I ran into myself running Ghost selfhosted.
Ghost doesn’t support pay-what-you-want natively, and I went through every workaround before building my own solution. First tried LemonSqueezy with a custom HTML pricing table and theme hacks to keep it out of Ghost’s native flow. Then automated the webhook side with n8n self-hosted. Worked, but it was a lot of moving parts to maintain.
What I actually wanted was: buyer picks their amount in LemonSqueezy, pays, Ghost membership activates. No spreadsheet, no manual step, no 2am webhook failures.
So I built that into PayGlue, which I’m actively running myself right now for exactly this use case. The flow:
- Set up a PWYW product in LemonSqueezy with a minimum price
- Connect it to PayGlue and map that product to a Ghost membership tier
- Drop the generated button or pricing table onto any Ghost page
- Buyer pays whatever they want above the minimum, webhook fires, Ghost Admin API grants membership access automatically
That’s it. Ghost never knows PayGlue exists beyond the API calls it receives, and your existing Stripe setup keeps running completely untouched alongside it.
Currently in closed beta with small batches, deliberately slow onboarding while all providers get properly tested across real billing cycles. Waitlist is open at payglue.io.
If you want to see the full pricing table flow in action before signing up, I put together a live demo you can actually interact with: blog.payglue.io/what-a-full-pricing-table-looks-like-when-it-talks-to-ghost
I actually noticed that @Molly_White has this going for her Citation Needed Ghost Site.
I also want this, it’s the real deal for niche communities. And it’s the middle ground for marketing/content value.