One of the reasons I never sign up for Ghost is that I think the pricing is too high. $15 for the basic package is double than it should be per month.
I run 8 wordpress sites on one hosted package costing me around $50 per year. I would certainly not be motivated to pay $15 per month for ONE basic site.
There are other options out there that are cheaper. My Ghost hosting is $36 a year. If you don’t want newsletters and just run a blog, this is great. You’ll just have to get Brevo or Amazon Ses for transactional emails which is pretty much pennies with these services.
I’m unsure if Mailgun has a flex plan still, this allows certain amount of emails to be free for newsletters.
You can host Ghost yourself if you like or use an alternative provider like Magic Pages.
Because Ghost bundles newsletter functionality, payments, social and analytics, it’s really more comparable to Wordpress+Mailchip+Patreon plus the value of those analytics and social integrations.
I’ve been able to learn what the specific costs were for some small local news outlets that use all those features and Ghost ends up being cheaper then their old WordPress hosting. For outlets with paying subscribers, the 5% fees that Patreon charges vs the 0% mark up by Ghost are a big deal.
Pikapods are reportedly an even cheaper way to host Ghost, but may have more reliability or capacity problems. I haven’t tried them.
Confusing the Ghost software with Ghost Pro is a very common misconception.
I recently published a guide to find the best hosting option for Ghost:
I hope this will help.
Synaps is the way. Murat is excellent and made the whole process so easy for me.
Sound good, 4 euro per month it more better…
Personally I place a lot of value on where the money I pay for Ghost(Pro) goes - supporting a non-profit to create better online tools for writers sound like the kind of thing I would want to do anyway. If I was self-hosting, I’d have to factor in the cost of a regular OpenCollective donation on top!