Hey everyone. I’d like to set up three different tiers of membership: One free and available for anyone to sign up, one paid and available for anyone, and one paid but invite-only.
I found I can do that by creating 3 different tiers and then displaying just the first two in the portal signup options page.
But once I’ve done that, how do I invite people to the third, invite-only tier?
The challenge here is that signing up for a plan or upgrading to a new plan would normally go through portal. And if you turn the plan off in portal (so that it isn’t offered to everyone), then it isn’t available on the upgrade page either.
It’s going to be a little bit of a hack, but here’s the only solution I’ve got that isn’t custom coding. (Custom coding also possible. Just because Portal doesn’t show an upgrade path doesn’t mean you can’t talk to the API directly and make it happen.) Leave the special plan unchecked in the Portal settings. Create an OFFER for the special plan. (Maybe there’s a day of free trial, or maybe you discount it off of the ‘list price’.) Send the link to the offer to anyone you’d like to invite to have access.
Caveat: Ghost doesn’t enforce any restrictions on who can sign up and pay for a tier. Turning a tier off from display in Portal makes it less visible, but doesn’t 100% prevent someone from signing up for it. (It’s still visible at the tiers endpoint.)
That would work great for me, actually. I am considering making this a free tier anyway, so I could just give people a 100% discount to do that. Thank you!