Complimentary subscription not being applied to imported members without Stripe connected

Memberships & subscriptions
1

I’m migrating an existing paid publication to Ghost(Pro) and have about 445 existing subscribers. These subscribers are billed outside Ghost (enterprise/site licenses, invoices, and our existing payment processor), so I don’t want to use Stripe for these existing accounts.

I need these members to have access to posts set to Paid-members only.

I imported the members using a CSV with complimentary_plan=true. Ghost accepted the import and mapped the field to Complimentary plan, but the members still appear as Free and cannot access Paid-members-only posts.

To troubleshoot, I re-imported a single existing member with:

subscribed_to_emails=false
complimentary_plan=true

Ghost reported that the member was successfully updated. However, when I impersonate that member and visit a Paid-members-only post, the member still receives the “This post is for paying subscribers only” / “Upgrade your account” message.

The member’s admin profile also does not show an “+ Add Complimentary Subscription” option.

I currently have only the standard Free tier configured and Stripe is not connected.

Does Ghost require Stripe to be connected and/or a paid tier to be configured before complimentary subscriptions can be created?

If so, can Stripe be connected solely to enable complimentary subscriptions while continuing to bill these 445 existing subscribers externally and without displaying paid self-service pricing publicly?

Ultimately I need externally billed enterprise subscribers to have Paid-members-only access while ordinary free registered members remain Free.

Thanks for any guidance.

2

You’re going to need to connect Stripe before it’ll be possible to add complimentary subscriptions. You don’t have to actually use it, but you do have to connect it.

You can turn off pricing display by unchecking the tiers in the portal settings.

You will probably also want to edit partials/content-cta.hbs to tell your free members how to become paid, since they can’t do it through the portal.