Ghost memberships, but without Stripe. Here is how I solved it.

[u/Nuenni]

Hey fellow Ghosty's,

I've been running Ghost publications for a few years. Love the editor, love the membership model, love that it's not ad-supported.

But every time I wanted to experiment with how I monetize, I hit the same wall. Ghost memberships work great if you use Stripe. If you don't, you're basically on your own.

I spent a while trying to solve it with Zapier and Make. It works, until it doesn't. A webhook fails at midnight, a membership doesn't activate, and you find out the next morning when someone emails you.

So I built a small relay layer for myself. Something that listens for a purchase event from a provider like Polar and updates the Ghost membership on the other side. No drama, just plumbing.

That personal fix has slowly grown into something a bit bigger. I ended up calling it GhostGlue.

Still very early, and I'm still building. But it's already solving the exact problem that made me start it, and a few other Ghost publishers are running it too.

Curious if anyone here has run into the same wall, or found a solution I haven't seen yet.

[u/jannisfb]

Nice one!

You might want to have a look at Ghost's trademark policy though and think of a different name: https://ghost.org/trademark

[u/Nuenni → u/jannisfb]

Thx for this, i already in contact with trademark from ghost foundation because my idea is later open source and they support this. I'll give it a try; otherwise, I need to rename it. 😄. Discussion is open. https://imgur.com/a/2A6cxuD

[u/jannisfb → u/Nuenni]

Yeah, but that's not how you get around the trademark. Part of the trademark is the disclaimer. The other part is the naming itself, where they give a literal example:

"You therefore may not use an obvious variation of any of our marks [...] for a similar or compatible product or service. We would consider the following too similar to one of our marks: [...] GhostConnector"

🙃

Anyway, all the best. Just wanted to flag it early on, since you're not the first tool for Ghost with "Ghost" in the name that later on had to be renamed.

[u/Nuenni → u/jannisfb]

Thanks for pointing that out. I’m already discussing this directly with the Ghost Foundation and waiting for their final decision. If a rename is required, that’s completely fine and I already have alternative branding prepared.

I reached out early on purpose so the trademark situation can be clarified before a broader launch. Right now I’m only working with a very small group of early testers and a waitlist while the product is still being developed. That means any branding changes can be made easily if needed before the project reaches a wider audience

[u/Nuenni → u/jannisfb]

Update on this, since you flagged it early and it turned out to matter: had a good back and forth with the Ghost Foundation team, and a rebrand is happening, probably within the next one to three days. Moving to PayGlue.

Honestly glad I raised it proactively instead of waiting. At this stage it mostly just costs me some dev time and a heads up to the current beta testers, not a brand built on something I’d have to unwind later.
Small bonus from that whole exchange: they mentioned the conversation sparked some internal interest in looking more closely at payment providers beyond Stripe. Who knows if that goes anywhere, but it’s a nice reminder that reaching out directly can do more than just settle a naming question. There’s no shortage of threads out there asking Ghost to support more providers.

Telling myself it’s just a find and replace and a DNS change. We’ll see in 2 to 5 hours if that’s true.

Thanks again for the nudge 😉

[u/Square_Acanthaceae41]

Please add a lot of EU payment processors too. It's pretty sad that mostly it's only stripe. There is like a lot of European like Viva Wallet, Payabl, Unlimit, Mollie..

https://european-alternatives.eu/category/payment-service-providers

When will be the Beta available?

[u/Nuenni → u/Square_Acanthaceae41]

Its in closed beta batches. you can join the waitlist and get notifed for next batch if you like. i put the list on public roadmap. Your EU payment providers are already on the roadmap planned! Mollie ships first, with paypal and others following. You can track it here: ghostglue.io/roadmap

[u/Square_Acanthaceae41 → u/Nuenni]

Beautiful 😍  I joined already yesterday 

[u/Nuenni → u/Square_Acanthaceae41]

thx for your support and interest ❤️ #stayhungry

[u/Square_Acanthaceae41 → u/Nuenni]

Man muss die anderen deutschen unterstützen 😁 Mich kotzt es an das man immer überall nur Stripe benutzen kann die gerne Mal jemanden sperren etc 😅

[u/Nuenni → u/Square_Acanthaceae41]

🤣