Ghost

Hey IndieHackers 👋 It's been 9 years since the first version of Ghost launched on Kickstarter and today we're excited to launch the 5th major version of the platform.

Around this time last year, we launched the first public version of Ghost with memberships and subscriptions built-in natively. Ever since then, we've been sprinting to keep up with demand as the creator economy has taken off at full-tilt.

So, the major focus of this release has been expanding on that core foundation and delivering a set of features to help creators build successful indie businesses themselves.

You can click through to the post if you want the full run-down, but here's a quick overview of what's new:

📬 Ghost can now run multiple newsletters for different types of content, each with their own sender names, branding and subscription lists.

📈 We completely overhauled the dashboard to make it more powerful, with revenue, engagement and native email stats, at a glance.

💰 Custom subscription tiers make it possible to offer your audience more ways to become paid subscribers, and a native offers feature allows you to grow your revenue (still with 0% payment fees).

✍️ A host of new cards in the Ghost editor allow publishers to add GIFs, call outs, toggles, products, videos, audio, and much more to their content.

💅 We've released several official new open source themes and introduced new ways to customise brand settings for websites and newsletters, directly inside Ghost Admin.

➕ Plus, brand new developer tutorials, performance improvements, and much more

Full changelog here:
https://ghost.org/changelog/5/

I also spent a bit of time in the post above talking about our product strategy as a self-funded indie company, which has certainly been pretty different to all our funded competitors. Back when we first started working on memberships in Ghost, we were a team of 5 with $36k MRR trying to figure out how to realise our dreams.

Today Ghost is a team of 31 with $5M annual revenue. Still completely open source, still non-profit, still remote, still decentralised, still growing — and still 100% independent.

A new business model for publishing, a more powerful headless CMS and a refined publishing experience.

Ghost is about 6 years old now, and this is the biggest release we've done since the original launch. The company is structured as an Indie Non-profit organisation, and everything we do is released as open source.

3.0 is a big step in a new direction for us, enabling indie publishing businesses to be created with a really easy way to spin up a recurring revenue members website using stripe — and it's open source, so you own every part of it. This may come in handy for indie makers who are looking to launch an MVP with simple billing without having to build a whole platform, too :)