Ghost

A publishing platform that respects your words and your wallet. Newsletter, blog, and membership site in one. No Substack tax.

⏱ 25 min ◆◆◇ some copy-pasting ↺ reversible

What it does

Publish a blog, send a newsletter, sell paid memberships - all from one self-hosted platform. Subscribers live in your database, not behind an API. No 10% cut of your revenue.

Why it's on the shelf

Substack takes 10% of your paid subscriptions plus Stripe's fees. ConvertKit starts at $25/month and scales to $100+ fast. Ghost takes 0% of your revenue. You pay for a VPS ($5/month) and Stripe handles payments. For a 1,000-subscriber paid newsletter, that's $50/year vs $1,200+.

What it replaces

Substack, ConvertKit, Beehiiv, Memberful. Whatever you pay for that today is what this page is here to delete. Worth being honest with yourself first though: if the bill is already small, the answer may still be that this isn't worth your Saturday.

Skip this one if... You don't want a server you're responsible for. Ghost runs on your own box, which is what makes it free and what makes it yours - but it also means the backups, the updates and the 11pm restart are on you. If that's a no, close the tab; it'll cost you 25 min to find out the hard way.

Setting it up

These are the steps in order. The time on the bar above is what this took us end to end, including the reading.

Provision a $5/month VPS with Ubuntu
Run the official Ghost CLI installer: ghost install
The CLI handles SSL, Nginx, and database setup automatically
Create your admin account at yourdomain.com/ghost
Connect Stripe in settings to enable paid memberships

The code

The actual configuration, not a sketch of one. The highlighted lines are the ones you have to change.

What this doesGhost's one-command installer. The CLI configures Nginx, SSL, and the database.

terminal

# Install the Ghost CLInpm install ghost-cli@latest -g# Create a directory and installmkdir -p /var/www/ghost && cd /var/www/ghostghost install  ← the CLI does the rest# It will ask for your domain and set up SSL

Before you run this If you self-host email delivery, deliverability is on you. Most people use a transactional email service (Resend, Postmark) for reliable delivery - $5-20/month depending on volume.

What it costs to run

Runs on a $5/month VPS (1GB RAM). Ghost's official CLI handles everything.

This keeps working without us Ghost runs on your own box under the MIT, with your data in your own database. If Growth Dudes stops existing tomorrow, nothing on this page stops working. That is deliberate, and it's the only promise here we can actually keep.

Field notes

What people found when they actually ran it - dated, named and specific, including the times our setup number turned out to be optimistic.

Nobody has posted one for Ghost yet.

We're not going to invent them. Run it, then tell the room what actually happened - the time you got, and the step that wasn't in the instructions.

Join and post one

Others people run alongside it

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Plausible Analytics

Privacy-first web analytics you host yourself. No cookies, no consent banners, no 47-dashboard clutter.

Read the teardown →

⏱ 15 min ◆◇◇ copy, paste, done ↺ reversible

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Postiz

Schedule and publish to every social platform from one self-hosted dashboard. The Buffer replacement that doesn't cost $120/year.

Read the teardown →

⏱ 30 min ◆◆◇ some copy-pasting ↺ reversible

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Twenty CRM

A CRM that looks like a 2025 product, not a 2008 enterprise tool. Open source, self-hosted, no per-seat pricing.

Read the teardown →

⏱ 45 min ◆◆◇ some copy-pasting ↺ reversible