Is Ghost or Memberful cheaper?

Ghost starts at $18/mo billed yearly (Starter, up to 1,000 members); $0 to self-host plus infrastructure (free plan available). Memberful starts at $49 per month plus a 4.9 percent transaction fee (free trial).

Ghost vs Memberful

An independent, review-free comparison compiled by the SaaSTracker editorial team. Both products are profiled in full, and neither can pay for placement here.

The short answer

Editorial assessment

Memberful compared with Ghost

Ghost is the closest philosophical cousin: open source, own your domain, own your Stripe, no platform fee at all. Ghost is a publishing platform with memberships built in, so if your product is writing, Ghost is cheaper and more complete. Memberful is the better fit when the paid thing is community access across Discord, Discourse, and a podcast rather than a publication.

Choose Ghost if

Independent publishers and small media businesses earning real subscription revenue who want to keep all of it, own their platform, control their design completely, and treat their publication as a website rather than a newsletter that happens to have an archive.

Choose Memberful if

Independent publishers, podcasters, and newsletter writers who already have a community running on Discord, Discourse, or WordPress and want to charge for access to it under their own brand, into their own Stripe account, without moving anyone to a new platform.

Side by side

13 attributes

Attribute	Ghost	Memberful
Category	ESPs	Community
Starting price	$18/mo billed yearly (Starter, up to 1,000 members); $0 to self-host plus infrastructure (free plan available)	$49 per month plus a 4.9 percent transaction fee (free trial)
Pricing model	Ghost(Pro) managed hosting priced by member count across four plans, with unlimited email sends on every plan and 0 percent taken from subscription revenue. Alternatively self-host the MIT-licensed software at no licence cost, paying only for a server and for Mailgun, which is the only supported bulk email provider on self-hosted installs.	A single published plan at a flat monthly fee plus a percentage of transactions processed through your own Stripe account, with unlimited members, and a custom priced Enterprise tier above it.
Free plan	No free managed tier, but the software itself is MIT-licensed and free to self-host forever with no feature gating in core.	No
Free trial	14 days on all new Ghost(Pro) accounts, no credit card required	Free until you go live and start accepting payments; there is no fixed length countdown
Best for	Independent publishers and small media businesses earning real subscription revenue who want to keep all of it, own their platform, control their design completely, and treat their publication as a website rather than a newsletter that happens to have an archive.	Independent publishers, podcasters, and newsletter writers who already have a community running on Discord, Discourse, or WordPress and want to charge for access to it under their own brand, into their own Stripe account, without moving anyone to a new platform.
Setup time	An hour on Ghost(Pro) to a live publication with a default theme, a newsletter, and Stripe connected. Self-hosting is a half-day for someone comfortable with a Linux server, longer if you also want native analytics, which requires standing up a Tinybird backend. Building or customizing a Handlebars theme is a separate project measured in days.	A few hours. Connecting Stripe, defining plans, embedding the checkout, and authorizing the Discord or Discourse integration are each a small task, and nothing needs to be designed from scratch because the member facing pages are themeable templates.
Learning curve	Low for writing and membership, moderate for design, and genuinely technical if you self-host. The editor and membership system are approachable. Theme development requires Handlebars and front-end skills, and NQL takes a little study before member filtering clicks. Self-hosting demands real system administration competence, including the Mailgun-only bulk email constraint that catches people out.	Low if you already run the community, moderate if you do not, because Memberful assumes you understand your own stack. There is no discussion product to learn, only plans, entitlements, and integrations.
Platforms	Ghost(Pro) managed hosting, Self-hosted on Ubuntu with Node 22, MySQL 8, and NGINX, Headless via the Content API behind any front-end framework	Web, Members access benefits through your site, Discord, Discourse, WordPress, or their podcast app
Compliance	GDPR with a DPA auto-accepted through the terms of service, Cookie-free first-party analytics, No advertising and no data resale	GDPR, PCI DSS handled by Stripe, Global sales tax and VAT collection at checkout
Founded	2013	2013
Headquarters	Registered in Singapore as a non-profit foundation; the team is fully remote across five continents	United States, distributed team
Ownership	Non-profit foundation with a constitution meaning it can never be bought or sold; no venture capital, no external investors, and 100 percent of revenue reinvested	Owned by Patreon

Strengths and limitations

Ghost

Strengths

Zero percent taken from subscription revenue on Publisher and above, which compounds into tens of thousands of dollars a year for any successful publication.
Unlimited email sends on every plan, so send frequency never drives cost, which is close to unique in this category.
MIT-licensed open source with a genuine self-hosting path and no feature gating in core, making the exit real rather than rhetorical.
A non-profit foundation structure that legally cannot be bought or sold, with no venture capital and all revenue reinvested, which removes the acquisition and take-rate-increase risk every competitor carries.

Limitations

The Starter plan does not support paid subscriptions at all and excludes custom themes and most integrations, which makes the $18 headline price misleading for anyone intending to monetize.
Automation is new and narrow. Email sequences only reached beta in June 2026 and are triggered by new membership rather than by arbitrary behavior, so this is not a branching workflow builder.
No native newsletter A/B testing or subject-line split testing, which is a real gap for anyone optimizing open rates.
No meaningful discovery engine. Recommendations and ActivityPub help, but there is nothing comparable to Substack's Notes feed or beehiiv's boost marketplace for finding new readers.

Memberful

Strengths

The Discord integration is the best in this category: roles assigned by plan, invites sent at checkout, and access revoked automatically on lapse, with no bot to maintain.
Discourse group mapping means an existing, search indexed forum can grow a paid tier without migrating and losing its rankings, which no all in one platform can offer.
Payments settle into your own Stripe account, so your subscription data and merchant relationship stay yours and leaving does not force every member to re-enter a card.
Genuinely white label. Custom domain, custom themes, and dynamic paywalls mean the vendor is invisible to members, which is why Patreon bought it as its non Patreon.com answer.

Limitations

It hosts no community at all. Without Discord, Discourse, or WordPress already in place, there is nothing for the paywall to protect.
The 4.9 percent fee does not improve with scale on the published plan, so the effective cost stays near 8.5 percent of revenue at any volume unless you negotiate Enterprise.
No courses, no lessons, no progress tracking, and no certificates, so a course business needs a different product entirely.
No mobile app of any kind, branded or otherwise; the member experience is the web plus whatever Discord or Discourse provides.

Pricing compared

Ghost

Ghost(Pro) managed hosting priced by member count across four plans, with unlimited email sends on every plan and 0 percent taken from subscription revenue. Alternatively self-host the MIT-licensed software at no licence cost, paying only for a server and for Mailgun, which is the only supported bulk email provider on self-hosted installs.

Starter$18
Publisher$29
Business$199
CustomQuoted
Self-hosted$0 licence

Ghost is exceptional value for a publication with real subscription revenue and poor value for one without. The 0 percent take rate, unlimited email sends, and full theme control mean that at $200,000 of annual revenue Ghost(Pro) Business costs about $2,400 a year against roughly $20,000 to Substack, and you get a real website and real APIs in the exchange. Below monetization the calculus reverses: $29 a month is a genuine cost where Substack and beehiiv both offer usable free tiers, and Ghost gives you no discovery engine to compensate. The Business tier at $199 is also a sharp cliff from $29 that deserves modelling against beehiiv at the same member count. The self-hosting option is real and valuable as an escape hatch, but treat it as insurance rather than as a way to save money, because a VPS plus Mailgun commonly costs more than the Publisher plan does.

Memberful

A single published plan at a flat monthly fee plus a percentage of transactions processed through your own Stripe account, with unlimited members, and a custom priced Enterprise tier above it.

Standard$49
EnterpriseCustom

Memberful is excellent value at small scale and poor value at large scale, and you should decide which one you are. A podcaster doing $2,000 a month gets a genuinely well built billing system, automatic Discord entitlements, private podcast feeds, gift and group plans, retention discounts, and their own Stripe account for about $150 all in, which is fair. The same creator at $50,000 a month is handing over roughly $51,000 a year in fees for software that hosts nothing, when Podia or Teachable would do the billing for a flat $84 to $189 a month. The counterargument is real but narrow: nothing else automates Discord and Discourse entitlements this cleanly, nothing else keeps your Stripe relationship intact, and if your community is already thriving somewhere free, Memberful is the only product here that does not ask you to move it. Buy it as plumbing, negotiate Enterprise pricing the moment you pass roughly $20,000 a month, and never buy it expecting a community product.

Editorial verdict on each

Ghost

Ghost is the right answer for a publication that has stopped being a newsletter and become a business. Zero percent on subscriptions, unlimited email sends, full Handlebars theme control, native cookie-free analytics, an open-source escape hatch, and a non-profit structure that legally cannot be sold together make it the only product in this category with no plausible story about how it gets worse later. The 2026 additions of email sequences, gift subscriptions, and dynamic member filters closed the automation gap that used to be the standard objection, and ActivityPub gives it a distribution surface nobody else has. The costs are real: $29 a month before you have earned anything where Substack and beehiiv are free, no discovery engine to speak of, no newsletter A/B testing, a sharp cliff to $199 on Business, and a self-hosting path that is cheaper in licence terms only. Choose Ghost when you have revenue to protect and a design identity to express. Choose Substack or beehiiv when you still need an audience more than you need control.

Read the full Ghost profile

Memberful

Memberful is the best answer to a specific question and the wrong answer to almost every other one. If your community already lives on Discord, Discourse, or WordPress and works, and you want to charge for access without moving anyone or handing 10 percent to Patreon, nothing else does this as cleanly: roles granted at checkout and revoked on lapse, private podcast feeds through your existing host, group plans, gifts, retention discounts, your own domain, and your own Stripe account so the subscriptions remain portable. That last point is worth more than it looks, because every other platform in this category makes leaving expensive by holding your billing relationship hostage. The reservation is the arithmetic. At 4.9 percent plus Stripe with a fee that does not improve as you grow, Memberful costs roughly 8.5 percent of revenue at $50,000 a month, where Podia or Teachable would do the billing for a flat sum and throw in the community, the courses, and the website. Buy it as plumbing for a community you already love, negotiate Enterprise pricing early, and do not buy it hoping for a community product, because it is not one and does not claim to be.

Read the full Memberful profile

Ghost profile last reviewed 2026-08-22; Memberful last reviewed 2026-08-22. Pricing is compiled from public sources and can change without notice. See our methodology.