Membership tiers?

Not yet, unfortunately :frowning_face:. Right now we’re just using PayPal recurring payments and adding on the Members manually. It’s not really integrated into the website.

We’ll probably revisit it at some point, but pretty caught up with other things at the moment. I’d be interested in hearing about other options too.

Wondering if there are any updates on this? I’m about to launch a Patreon-style model for some of my game development work, and would rather not use something like Patreon for a variety of reasons.

If this isn’t on the immediate roadmap, I thought I might investigate implementing it myself. Seems like it’d involve:

  • Branching the existing single-plan database schema, preserving current data as the first plan.
  • Supporting adding separate plans/prices in the admin interface. Maybe give each a level based on order, and gate content based on whether the plan level is high enough. Though maybe there are other use cases that aren’t tier-based, like treating each plan as separate and requiring content be gated via more complex conditional logic.
  • Add helpers in the router/templates to support content-gating.

This is valuable enough to me that I’d be willing to sink some time into making it happen, but is there enough of a framework for these sorts of community contributions? Or is the main development driven by Ghost employees? I wouldn’t want to push ahead with this and have a PR rejected because it doesn’t fit the roadmap. Or maybe this is already on the near-term roadmap and I shouldn’t investigate?

Also, is this something doable in the context of a single site? My Ghost installation has an apps/ folder, but I can’t figure out what these apps are. “ghost apps” isn’t particularly searchable, either. :slight_smile: Looks like these may have been a failed experiment, but I’m not entirely sure.

Thanks.

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Still wondering about Membership tiers as well. Is there a plan for various members through Portal? Has anyone found workable ways to personalize the code to allow for multiple tiered memberships?

I would love to use Ghost instead of Patreon or other membership systems.

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I’m also curious if there is a roadmap for this

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+1 for membership tiers, otherwise will have to use WP.

I see that in database (settings table) we have stripe_plans row. In this row we have all stripe plans - so we can manually add/edit plans and you will be able to subscribe to them. Ghost automatically sync plans to stripe, so you don’t need to manually update plans in the stripe dashboard. Settings also have portal_plans, but I am not sure that this does.

But there are few drawbacks about this:

  1. You can’t manage plans in Admin (otherwise you will break something)
  2. You need to implement subscribsion display yourself. Ghost portal has hardcoded plans, so in my case, I have Ghost portal fork.
  3. You can’t set visibility to a certain tier, so in my case, I use custom tags and in theme added support (options are hardcoded)

I see that I am not alone that uses this aproach.

P. S. Are there any plans to implement this feature? I would love to contribute to it.

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+1 For tiers. The use case is really clear:

People want to be able to have 3+ sections of a site:

  1. Free content (to build their audience and build trust).
  2. Entry-level paid content (basic monthly subscription model for exclusive blog posts etc).
  3. Premium-level paid content (one-time payment or higher-subscription rate paywalled from both 1 & 2) (e.g. premium access to an online course or other digital product).

Then Ghost would also be replacing teachable etc and empowering online course creators to own their own shop. If Ghost had this functionality I would be all-in.

Unless this is possible with “free”, “monthly” and “yearly”? Maybe I’m just missing something. Can I separate out the content that “monthly” payers and “yearly” payers can access?

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There’s also the question of international rates, and having different plans for different regions (my membership plan includes a print edition, so I need at least two plans: one for domestic and another for international). Not really “tiers” in that sense, but something that would be easy to implement if the levels weren’t hard-coded.

We will definitely be adding membership tiers to Ghost - but it’s not going to happen until memberships are out of beta, so that’s after the 4.0 release - which is the next big milestone we’re working toward.

Understand why lots of people are hungry for this feature, but like everyone else in the world, our team slowed down with covid lockdowns last year.

If anyone is interested in contributing to help make features happen faster, you can always follow along with the issues which are in progress on GitHub and offer to help. Open source products move as fast as the number of people who are willing to help work on them.

Either way, we’ll launch some version of custom tiers/plans in the next 6 months.


Note: There’s lots of good discussion on this topic, which is awesome - but I’m going to remove any further replies after this that just say “any update on this??” – because this is the update.

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I have a 3-tier plan at the moment:

  1. Free
  2. $5/Monthly subscription – aimed at the general public/supporter.
  3. $150/Annual subscription – one-time payment aimed at professionals.

What I would like – as a component of this development – is to offer the ability to pre-pay a recurring plan in one lump sum at a discount using a Stripe coupon code in the setup, So – $5/month but $45/year one-time payment.

Conceptually, I think a way to handle this is to decouple the amount being charged from the periodicity of the payment. When creating a “product/item” (in Stripe terms) you choose the amount and type independently. This could support other forms of income streams – especially if the payment could be initiated by a Javascript link in an HTML card (as a “membership benefit”). This would enable me to replace an external shopping cart expense like Snipcart.

I use internal tags to manage creating points of entry (pages, nav links) of content to free members and premium members (customization of aEsto theme by @inoryum). However, there is no internal distinction in the membership system between the two paid tiers. The ability to associate (out of the box without custom coding) an internal tag for every membership option would be helpful, and this should extend to choosing which group(s) to email to when publishing a post.

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+1 for tiers
Many “creators” are fed of youtube / patreon and such and they are looking for alternative.
multple tiers is a standard at the moment
Wp can do it, but it s not as sexy as Ghost: i d like to move some of them to ghost.

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+1 for at least 3 tiers plus free (I do not need free)

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I’m so looking forward to a ‘tiers’ feature. Moving away from Patreon to Ghost has been kinda painful only because this one missing feature.

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Thanks for the reply, John! Ghost is an incredible platform, and I completely understand open source approach can be slower, but ultimately, I believe, better. Really psyched for this feature because I know, like us, a ton of creators could then wash their hands completely of Patreon. Thanks again for prioritizing this and responding personally in the support forum. Another thing that sets Ghost above other options out there.

Hey John. I appreciate the update and understand how replies for updates might be annoying, however, this is important for my business. We may consider switching to another service given the estimate on this feature, so transparency here will help guide our decision.

Is there an update since your answer in February? Do you have a rough estimate of when we can expect this feature?

Thanks for understanding

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Right after Ghost 4 was launched, they said custom tiers were coming…they’re now at version 4.9.3…so I think that will be part of the big Ghost 5 splash

I’m holding off on switching from Patreon for this single reason.

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Any further updates? Just trying to gauge the time frame.

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I don’t see any signs of membership tiers yet, but Ghost does now support segmented emails and member categories. Basically, you can categorise members into different groups like “Podcast” or “VIP” and then send an email to only one or some of those groups:

I suppose a workaround, for us to use multiple membership tiers, would be to have a custom payment frontend that automatically updates and tags members appropriately in the Ghost database.

The API docs link to a /users/ endpoint which I’m not sure about, but I think it may link to member data: unfortunately it’s still “Experimental” and therefore isn’t fully documented, so we might have to experiment with modifying the Ghost database directly (usually not recommended).

On the other hand I’m happy to see this feature because it’s one step closer to custom membership tiers and therefore makes it more likely to happen soon :thought_balloon:

Hopefully! I keep checking this forum religiously hoping for some good news. As soon as the Tiers are introduced I know a ton of people are going to jump to ghost from Patreon.

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