Need Help: Managing Multi-Tier Country-Specific Membership Access in Ghost

Memberships & subscriptions
1

Hello Ghost Community,

I’m hoping someone can provide guidance on implementing a more complex membership structure that our organization needs. While we love Ghost for almost everything, we’ve hit a roadblock with membership tiers that’s becoming a significant pain point.

Our Current Situation

We need to offer the following membership structure:

  • Free: Community Membership
    • Select free posts/newsletters
  • Paid: GlobalACCESS Membership
    • Access to global security and geopolitical reporting
    • All global content, reports, and analysis
    • Global newsletters/posts/pages (excluding country-specific content)
  • Paid: CountryACCESS Memberships
    • Granular, country-specific security and geopolitical reporting
    • Individual subscriptions for countries like Ukraine, Bangladesh, DRC, Nigeria, Guatemala, etc.
    • Each country would be an additional monthly subscription fee

The Problem

It appears impossible to manage this structure because Ghost only allows one active subscription at a time. This means if a member wants to subscribe to 2 or 3 individual countries, they cannot do this.

We’ve considered pricing everything into a global access subscription, but that would be prohibitively expensive for members who only need access to specific countries.

What We’re Trying to Achieve

  1. Flexible Membership Access:
  • Members can access content based on their subscription tier
  • Members can upgrade/downgrade tiers (either self-service or by submitting a change request)
  1. Mixed Subscription Examples:
  • Example 1: Global subscription + 2 individual country subscriptions
  • Example 2: Global subscription only
  • Example 3: Single country subscription only
  1. Newsletter Management:
  • Global newsletters only viewable by global subscribers
  • Country-specific newsletters only viewable by respective country subscribers

Solutions Explored

We’ve looked into Memberstack, Zapier, and Acta integrations, but none seem capable of handling this structure.

Is this even possible with Ghost? Has anyone implemented a similar tiered structure? Are there third-party tools or workarounds we haven’t considered?

Any guidance, resources, or examples would be immensely appreciated. We’re committed to Ghost but need to solve this access challenge to meet our organization’s needs.

Thanks in advance for your help!

2

So, interestingly, if you create a second subscription for a member in Stripe, nothing is immediately broken.

Post access works fine in Source. (This may be theme-dependent.)

The admin panel looks fine:

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But Portal doesn’t, showing only one of the two subscriptions:

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(Nothing seems horribly broken, just the second sub is not visible.)

I was able to make changes in portal (from yearly to monthly and cancelling) on the first plan, without messing up the second one.

Takeaway: If you replace portal with custom membership management (which some themes partially do already), this may very well be possible in Ghost.

Update: In case the post above doesn’t make it obvious, this is not explicitly supported in Ghost, and it’s possible that something important would go wrong that wasn’t revealed by a couple minutes of testing on a demo site in test mode.

1 Like
3

Thanks! Which theme would be best for the custom membership options??

4

I know of a lot of paid themes that do partial logic replacement. I’m not sure I know of any that replace everything membership-related. It’d probably require some custom work, but maybe one of the theme creators on the forum will chime in here! :)

Another option would be to patch portal to handle multiple subscriptions, which might actually be easier than replacing all the functionality.