Stripe Checkout Session fails with “Managed Payments cannot be used with Connect” on self-hosted Ghost 6.52.1

Bugs
1

Ghost version: 6.52.1 (self-hosted on DigitalOcean)
Stripe: Live mode, connected via the normal “Connect with Stripe” button

Problem
When a visitor tries to sign up for a paid tier, the portal shows “Unable to initiate checkout session”.

Browser Network tab and Ghost logs both show a 400 on
POST /members/api/create-stripe-checkout-session/

Stripe’s error is:

You specified a Stripe-Account header, but Managed Payments cannot be used with Connect.

What we’ve already ruled out

  • Managed Payments is not enabled on the Stripe account (still shows “Get started”).
  • Products have been created with categories that Stripe marks as Ineligible for Managed Payments.
  • Full disconnect / reconnect of Stripe, archiving all old products, and creating brand-new tiers has been tried multiple times.
  • The actual Checkout Session request body sent by Ghost contains no managed_payments (or similar) parameter.

Stripe Support’s current position
They confirmed the account is a connected account under Ghost’s Connect platform and that Managed Payments is incompatible with Connect. Because Ghost is not sending a Managed Payments flag, they have escalated the case internally to investigate possible account-level configuration issues.

Request
Has anyone else on recent Ghost versions (especially 6.5x) run into this? Is Ghost somehow triggering Managed Payments evaluation on Connect accounts even without the parameter?

Happy to provide request IDs, full request bodies, or Ghost logs if helpful.

2

Hey @JustinCremer,

Stripe Managed Payments and Stripe Connect features are incompatible and we’ve pushed a fix this morning that explicitly disables Managed Payments for all Stripe Checkout sessions created with Ghost (subscription, gifts, donations): 🐛 Fixed Stripe checkout failing for accounts with Managed Payments enabled by sagzy · Pull Request #29715 · TryGhost/Ghost · GitHub

Managed Payments is not enabled on the Stripe account (still shows “Get started”).

However, I do not understand how you’re running into that error without Managed Payments enabled :thinking:

Are you still getting that error as of now?

3

Thank you. Yes my account had managed payments enabled, which I was not aware of. This was corrected by the help desk and payments are working now. I found it odd that I could not see or change this attribute. Nonetheless this is resolved.