Ghost 4.0 - Newsletters, memberships, subscriptions - all in one place

Hey Product Hunters 👋 It's been 8 years since the first version of Ghost launched on Kickstarter and I'm really excited to share Ghost 4.0 with you today. We've shipped more than ever and doubled our team since our last major release back in October 2019. There's so much new stuff it doesn't all fit into a single post, but here's some of the highlights: 📈 We built the dashboard! Now you get real stats on how many posts are read, who's reading them, and who your most engaged members are. 💰 Native memberships and subscriptions are no longer in beta. Publishers who started Ghost sites with Ghost last year are already making more than $2Million per year in revenue. 135 currencies supported, with 0% payment fees. 📬 Email newsletters are built-in too — Whenever you publish a post, you can deliver it by email to all your members. A year ago we sent about 6,000 emails a month. Today: Several million. 👩‍💻 New member management features allow creators to easily import, keep track of and offer support to their members. 💅 We've released several popular themes, free and open source, alongside a brand new theme marketplace and experts directory. Sites are easier to customise too, with simple brand settings inside Ghost Admin. ⚡️ Plus, a host of new integrations, a brand new $9 starter plan and code refactors that have improved overall performance! We've come a long way in 8 years, and Ghost is now a team of 21, with $3.3M annual revenue, still structured as a nonprofit organisation, and still making everything we do open source. As always, thanks so much for all your support! Full changelog here: https://ghost.org/changelog/4/

Jeepers now that's a huge release with some big community earnings to back it - it must be so rewarding seeing creators quit their day jobs after monetizing (with real MRR) on the new platform. Respect and well done.

On a personal level, I love Ghost and especially so with version 4. - I believe Ghost is going in the right direction to help decentralize media (and we greatly need that) - I love Ghost 4 and its main features and plan to build a few communities on top of it - I do believe the Ghost team is often times too strongly opinionated (some UX at admin level, social profiles restricted to twitter and facebook, email integrations, etc.) - I also believe Ghost team should allow for more freedom of choice (the core idea of open source) within Ghost (options/toggles to turn on/off various features, like members/portal) Sammy from https://it.vpnwelt.com.

It’s like y’all knew I had just finished my website 😂😭

Switched our blog from Hubspot to Ghost a year ago -- turned out to be a great decision. Looking forward to this update....the in-platform analytics look especially delicious. :)

Georgeous dashboard! :)

Love the amount of detail you folks put into design and copywriting 👌

Congrats to you and for the Ghost team, John! I'm so excited for this release and thankful for the hard work you did over the years to bring Ghost to this stage. The new logo is lovely ❤️

Super exciting to see one of my favourite pieces of software getting more powerful and useful for creators. It's been a blast following the progress of v4 over the past ~year masquerading as smaller v3 features 😅 I've been betting on Ghost becoming a standard in online publishing since I started working on Cove about a year ago, and I'm glad more and more people are starting to find out about it. It's the future.

That's it team! Love the native memberships and the zipless themes, I was just asked by a friend about options for a new site, and I think I know what I'll be recommending then... Great timing.