Ghost Pricing: Ghost Pro Cost and Self-Hosted Cost

Ghost has two prices and they are not close to each other. Ghost(Pro), the hosted version run by the Ghost team, starts at $18 a month. The Ghost software itself is free and open source, so self-hosting costs whatever your server and email provider charge, which is often $12 to $27 a month once email is real. Which one is cheaper flips depending on how many subscribers you have, and the flip happens sooner than most people expect.

Every figure below was read off ghost.org, docs.ghost.org, mailgun.com and DigitalOcean's price list in September 2026. A lot of the Ghost pricing articles in circulation still quote $15 a month for Starter, which is no longer what Ghost publishes.

How much does Ghost cost?

Ghost costs $18 a month for Ghost(Pro) Starter, rising to $29 for Publisher and $199 for Business, all billed yearly. The self-hosted version costs nothing for the software plus your own server and email bill, realistically $12 to $27 a month for a small publication. Ghost also sells a Custom tier at quote-only pricing.

One detail worth knowing before you compare anything: the prices on ghost.org's pricing table are the yearly billing rates. The page has a monthly billing toggle, but it does not publish the monthly figures as static text, so anyone quoting you a monthly Ghost(Pro) price is either reading it from inside the app or guessing. Treat $18, $29 and $199 as annual-commitment numbers.

How much does Ghost Pro cost?

Ghost(Pro) has three published tiers and a quote-only fourth. The pricing page carries a slider labelled "Based on an audience up to", running from 0 to 100k+ members, but the tier prices themselves are fixed. What changes between tiers is the member ceiling, the staff seat count, and which revenue features are switched on.

Notice that Starter and Publisher share the same 1,000 member ceiling. The jump from $18 to $29 buys features, not audience. The jump from $29 to $199 is where the member ceiling moves, and it moves a long way, from 1,000 straight to 10,000 with nothing in between. That gap is the single most expensive thing about Ghost(Pro) pricing, and it is what pushes growing newsletters toward self-hosting at exactly the point they start succeeding.

Email sends are unlimited on every plan, which is genuinely generous and is the main thing self-hosting cannot match for free.

Is Ghost free?

The Ghost software is free. Ghost is open source under the MIT licence, there is no paid edition of the application, and no feature is locked behind a licence key. What is not free is running it: a server, a domain, TLS, MySQL, backups and a bulk email provider are all yours to pay for.

So "free Ghost" means free software on infrastructure you rent. For a blog with no newsletter that can genuinely be about $12 a month. For a newsletter with a few thousand subscribers, the email bill alone makes it a real line item.

What does it cost to self-host Ghost?

Two bills: the server and the email. Everything else is your time.

DigitalOcean's published Droplet rates, read on 3 September 2026, are $6 for 1 GB, $12 for 2 GB and $24 for 2 vCPU with 4 GB. Mailgun charges beyond the included volume at tiered overage rates running from $1.80 down to $1.10 per thousand emails depending on plan. The DigitalOcean pricing breakdown has the full ladder if you want to size it precisely.

Does self-hosted Ghost need Mailgun?

If you send a newsletter, yes, in practice. Ghost supports Mailgun as its bulk email provider for newsletters, and this is the single most common surprise in self-hosted Ghost budgets. Transactional email (password resets, member sign-in links) is separate and lighter, but the newsletter blast needs a real provider.

The free tier trips people up because it is metered per day, not per month. 100 emails a day sounds like 3,000 a month, but a newsletter goes out in one burst. A single send to 300 subscribers exceeds the daily allowance on its own, so any list bigger than about 100 people means the $15 Basic plan from the first send.

If you also want to run your own mail for the domain rather than just newsletters, that is a separate job with its own DNS and deliverability work. We cover it in the guide to running a self-hosted mail server, though for newsletter delivery specifically a provider is the right answer.

What server do you need to run Ghost?

Ghost's own documented requirements are specific: Ubuntu 22.04, 24.04 or 26.04, a server with at least 1 GB of memory, MySQL 8.0 or 8.4, NGINX at 1.9.5 or newer for SSL, a supported Node.js version, and a registered domain with its DNS A record already pointing at the server before you install.

The 1 GB minimum is a floor rather than a recommendation. Node and MySQL 8 on the same 1 GB box leaves very little headroom, and the symptom is the MySQL process being killed under memory pressure during an import or a backup. 2 GB is the size to buy if you would rather not think about it again.

Two documented limitations to know before you pick an install method. Ghost's standard installer is explicitly not intended for local development or core contribution. And it does not support self-hosted web analytics or fully self-hosted ActivityPub, so if you want either of those, Ghost points you at the Docker Compose install instead.

Is self-hosting Ghost cheaper than Ghost Pro?

Below roughly a thousand subscribers, usually not. Above it, dramatically. Here are three real bills.

A blog with 500 readers and no newsletter. Self-hosted: $12 for a 2 GB server, no email provider needed, so $12 a month. Ghost(Pro) Starter: $18 a month. Self-hosting saves $6, which is not enough money to be the reason. Pick on whether you want to own a server.

A newsletter with 800 subscribers, sending weekly. That is about 3,200 emails a month, but in 800-email bursts, so the Mailgun free tier is out and Basic applies. Self-hosted: $12 server plus $15 email equals $27 a month. Ghost(Pro) Starter covers 1,000 members with unlimited sends for $18 a month. Ghost(Pro) is cheaper and less work. This is the case where self-hosting is the wrong answer, and it is a common one.

A newsletter with 5,000 subscribers, sending weekly. About 20,000 emails a month. Self-hosted: $24 server plus Mailgun Foundation at $35 equals $59 a month. On Ghost(Pro), 5,000 members is over the 1,000 ceiling on both Starter and Publisher, so the only plan that holds them is Business at $199 a month. Self-hosting saves $140 a month, about $1,680 a year.

The pattern is clear once you see it. Ghost(Pro) is cheaper while you are small because unlimited email sends are bundled. Self-hosting wins the moment you cross the 1,000 member ceiling, because Ghost's next tier up is a 6.9x price increase and your own email bill grows in far smaller steps.

What do you lose on the Ghost Starter plan?

Starter is the tier most people land on, and it withholds more than the price difference suggests. It does not include marketplace or custom themes, paid subscriptions, tips and donations, advanced analytics, a custom sending domain, ad networks, or automation tools. Publisher at $29 adds those, including paid subscriptions with no transaction fee taken by Ghost.

The consequential one is paid subscriptions. On Starter you cannot charge readers at all, so a publication on the cheapest tier has no native way to earn from its audience, which is why many writers on Starter monetize by pointing readers at the tools and gear they actually recommend until the subscriber revenue justifies the upgrade. The other quiet limit is the single staff user: adding one editor means Publisher.

Self-hosting has none of these gates. Every feature in the open source application is available at every size, including paid subscriptions and custom themes, which is a real part of the value and not just a cost story.

When is Ghost Pro worth the money?

When your list is under 1,000, when you do not want to own a server, or when the writing is the business and infrastructure is a distraction. At $18 or $29 a month with unlimited email sends bundled, Ghost(Pro) at small scale is priced below what the same setup costs you to run, and the Ghost team handles upgrades, backups and deliverability.

Self-host when you cross 1,000 members, when you want custom themes and paid subscriptions without paying for the tier that unlocks them, or when you already run servers and one more is marginal. What you take on is real: Ubuntu and MySQL updates, TLS renewal, backups you have tested restoring, and a Node process that needs to come back after a reboot. That is the actual price of the $140 a month you save at 5,000 subscribers.

If you go that way, the sane version is a managed server rather than a hand-built one. A server management panel provisions the Ubuntu, NGINX, MySQL and TLS stack Ghost documents, keeps certificates renewing and gives you atomic releases, so self-hosting is a monthly server bill instead of a weekend habit. It is the same pattern as any other self-hosted product: see the Nextcloud pricing breakdown for how the hosted-versus-self-hosted maths works out there.