The next major version of Ghost has arrived, and our 6.0 release is packed full of more upgrades and improvements than you can shake a stick at.

If you're short on time, and you just want the highlights:

• Ghost publications are now connected with an open network. People can discover, follow, like and reply to your posts across Bluesky, Flipboard, Threads, Mastodon, WordPress, Ghost, and any other social web platform. Distribution is now built-in.
• We're introducing a native analytics suite for Ghost, giving you detailed insights into how your content performs across web traffic, newsletters, and member subscriptions - all in real-time, all from the same place you publish everyday.
• Collectively, publishers on Ghost have now earned over $100M in revenue to support their work. Indie media isn't just surviving, it's thriving.
• We've shipped thousands of improvements and updates since Ghost 5.0 that make the product more powerful than ever before.
• For developers: Ghost is moving to a new official Docker Compose env, and our production stack is now Ubuntu 24, Node 22, and MySQL8.

If you want to try any of these things (and the many other improvements) go ahead and sign up for a free trial on Ghost.org and see for yourself. It's live now.

Or, if you want all the details about everything that's new, keep reading!

When we announced Ghost 5.0 a few years ago, we were proud to share that Ghost's revenue had hit $4M – while publisher earnings had surpassed $10M. It felt great to have such a clear sign that our goal to create a sustainable business model for independent creators was succeeding.

Today, Ghost's annual revenue is over $8.5M while total publisher earnings on Ghost have now surpassed $100M.

While the dominant narrative in the media industry today is one of layoffs and cutbacks in a market saturated with clickbait and AI — Ghost publishers, whose revenue has grown dramatically in the past 3 years, are telling a different story.

These successful media businesses follow a simple model that's been around for a long time: They make money by directly serving readers, rather than advertisers.

After more than a decade of clickbait undermining media credibility, subscription-based publishers are discovering a simple truth: Producing high quality content that readers genuinely value is a far better business than chasing low quality page views for diminishing ad revenue.

And after more than a decade of watching questionable growth tactics from Big Tech™️ — Ghost itself proves that same simple truth when it comes to platforms. Unlike our venture-backed peers obsessed with growth at all costs, we're structured as a non-profit foundation that serves publishers directly with open source software.

We believe independent media cannot be beholden to proprietary tech companies, so Ghost publishers don't just "own their email list" — they own the entire software stack that underpins their business, end to end.

Not a centralized platform controlled by a single corporation, but open infrastructure that's shared by everyone.

That's the dream of the open web, and the driving force behind everything we do.

$100,000,000 later — we feel confident saying: It's working.

Grow faster, with the social web

Ghost is the home of your publication on the web, and it has always had support for multiple open distribution channels to deliver new posts to your readers.

• Ghost 1.0 started with publishing by web and RSS feeds
• Ghost 3.0 added support for publishing by API and webhooks
• Ghost 4.0 enabled publishing by email newsletter

In Ghost 6.0 we're introducing another new distribution channel: The social web. Now, millions of people can discover, follow, like and reply to your posts from any supported social web client - including Bluesky, Mastodon, Threads, Flipboard, Ghost, WordPress, Surf, WriteFreely, and many more.

Just as people can visit your Ghost website in any browser, subscribe with any feed reader, or receive newsletters in any email client, they can now follow your Ghost publication from any social web client.

Unlike closed platforms with restrictive algorithms, open web protocols create a direct connection between you and your subscribers which you have full control over.

This direct relationship has been a major driver in the resurgence of email newsletters over the past few years. But, while email is a fantastic way of sending out updates, it’s a one way street. It doesn't, and can’t, have the network effects that are so powerful for generating growth, and reaching new people.

The social web turns your Ghost publication into a networked social profile that people can find, follow, like, reply, repost and interact with from anywhere —bringing network effects directly to decentralized publishing. Popular posts can be shared, re-posted, and discussed by millions of social web users.

What does that mean, in practice?

You now have a social web reader in admin to follow and read long-form content from other Ghost, WordPress or Flipboard publications. You can also follow and share short-form notes with people across Threads, Bluesky, Mastodon and others.

And, of course, others can discover and follow you.

For the first time in Ghost, you can send and receive likes and replies, and interact with other creators from all over the world, and all over the web.

Interactions like these have been the flywheel driving rapid growth for publishers and creators across closed platforms and social networks. Now they're built directly into Ghost on top of an open protocol called ActivityPub.

No opaque algorithms. No suppression of links. No unhinged mechabots.

If you've been around on the web for while, and you can remember back that far... you might even call it the return of the blogosphere.

Our social web integration is completely free, and works on all Ghost 6.0 sites, whether on Ghost(Pro) or self-hosted.

Learn what's working, with Ghost Analytics

Until now, we've had simple analytics in Ghost focused on memberships and newsletters. If you wanted to track page views, traffic sources, or visitor behavior on your site, you had to rely on third-party integrations.

In Ghost 6.0, we're shipping detailed, first-party analytics directly in the product, no extra tools or setup required. And, unlike third-party providers, it's fully integrated with everything you publish, giving you a full picture of engagement across your entire audience — all from the same place you publish every day.

Now you have the ability to filter all your data by audience to see what’s resonating across public visitors, free members, and paid members in real time, so you can understand what's working, and make informed decisions about what to publish next.

And this is just the start.

We've wanted to build something like this for a very long time, but up until now we didn't have a good way to create a system that could deal with storing, retrieving and filtering on huge numbers of events at scale.

Delivering data insights like this is relatively straightforward in a centralized SaaS app, but much more complex in a distributed open source app that you can self-host.

In fact, this feature was only made possible at all thanks to a deep partnership with our friends at Tinybird.

Over the past few years, Tinybird has become the default way to integrate analytics functionality into modern products in the same way that Stripe is the default way to integrate payments. They also have a wonderful habit of supporting open source products like Ghost, Dub, PaperMark, OpenStatus, and LocalStack.

As a result, we were able to turn Ghost Analytics into a powerful, first-party, cookie-free data platform built on an open source ClickHouse database.

On Ghost(Pro), our new advanced analytics features are included for free on the Publisher plan and higher — with all data stored in EU regions.

For developers who self-host Ghost, you can sign up for a free Tinybird account and bring your own API key to get things up and running following our integration documentation.

Upgrades to existing features

We've put an incredible amount of energy into ensuring that Ghost scales and remains reliable as our customers have grown from small blogs and websites, to successful media businesses with millions of subscribers, hundreds-of-millions of dollars in revenue, sending billions of emails.

It doesn't matter how many new features you ship if they don't work well, so a huge amount of our focus goes into continuously updating, improving, and refining our product based on user feedback.

Here's an overview of everything else new since 5.0

• We've done a complete rewrite of Ghost Explore, featuring top indie publications from all over the world.
• Support for publishing in over 60 different languages with automatic translations for portal, newsletters, search, and comments.
• Newsletters have been upgraded in a big way, with custom design settings, new conditional cards for advertising, premium previews for free subscribers, subtitles, built-in spam protection, support for showing your latest posts, subscriber details, audience feedback, comment links, delivery troubleshooting, and automatic list cleaning. You can even edit links in newsletters after they've already been sent.
• Our recommendations feature enables cross-promotion, so you can highlight your favorite publishers, and they can highlight you.
• Improved payment experience with support for 135 currencies, free trials, more payment methods like Apple Pay, Google Pay, CashApp and iDEAL, as well as automatic sales tax, and support for one-time payments with tips and donations.
• Multiple new themes including our new default Source theme for news sites, Solo for individual creators, Taste for food writers, and Episode for podcasters — all of which have support for new custom typography.
• We now have bulk actions for updating multiple posts at once, or duplicating them.
• We completely rebuilt the Ghost editor from the ground up with a more intuitive, powerful writing experience, including edit history, emoji autocomplete, TK reminders, internal linking, an inline image editor, and better support for landing pages with header cards and signup cards.
• We built integrated comments functionality, allowing you to build a community with high-quality, members-only discussion on your posts, then we upgraded it with more sorting, moderation and threaded replies.
• One of our most popular additions: A new announcement bar lets you share breaking news or special offers prominently at the top of your site.
• New 2FA and device verification to improve security for Ghost staff users, who now also have a history log, providing you with a full audit log of who-did-what, when.
• We now have native search built into Ghost, so your readers can dig through the archives and rediscover your best pieces of work.
• Embeddable signup forms help grow your audience from anywhere on the web, and extra support for custom signup terms.
• The Ghost Bookmarker browser extension lets you bookmark any webpage in a draft post, ideal for saving link roundup newsletters.
• Email notifications alert you instantly when new members sign up or upgrade, keeping you connected with your audience growth.
• A completely refreshed Ghost settings interface makes site configuration easier than ever. Mostly because it now has search built-in.
• Support for more staff social links to connect with followers across other networks.

Pricing updates on Ghost(Pro)

Alongside the launch of 6.0, we're making a handful of changes to pricing for new customers on our official Ghost(Pro) managed hosting.

First: We've significantly reduced pricing for accounts with large numbers of subscribers. In some cases, prices have been reduced by as much as 50%.

Second: We've increased pricing and adjusted limits on our cheapest plans. Previously they started at $9 and $25/mo, now they start at $15 and $29/mo.

Third: We're introducing a launch offer for new customers, providing 50% off any plan for the first 3 months, making it more affordable than ever before to start a new publication with Ghost 6.0!

If you're currently a customer, and these prices are higher than you currently pay, your pricing is not changing. We've always grandfathered all customers on pricing for the past 12 years, and this time is no different. You can keep your existing price and features.

If you're currently a customer, and these prices are lower than you currently pay, you can change to one of the new plans and pay less. We'll also be proactively notifying all customers by email who fall into this category.

A few quick answers to common questions:

Developer changes

On top of all the user-facing changes, we also have some exciting updates and changes for developers who build-on and work-with Ghost.

Ghost 6.0 represents the beginning of a major improvement to how Ghost is deployed. Up until now, Ghost has been installed with Ghost-CLI as a single app that runs on a VPS with one MySQL database, but our new social web and analytics features have been built as independent services that run alongside Ghost.

So, we're moving toward Docker Compose as the officially supported way to install, run and update Ghost. This is now available as a developer preview, and will become the default from Ghost 7.0 onward.

Other developer changes

• Ghost's official production stack is now Ubuntu 24, Node 22, and MySQL8
  • Footnote: Ghost does work with other operating systems, node versions, and databases - but as a small team, we document, test and support one narrow stack that we know works really well. OSS contributions are always welcome.
• We've shipped brand new Developer Documentation, which is once again open source (contributions welcome) and has upgraded search, as well as brand new support for llms.txt, so you can get Claude to do your bidding.
• We also shipped a VS Code extension last year to streamline theme development with syntax highlighting and live preview
• Google AMP support has been deprecated. 🪦 RIP. Won't miss you.
• If you're a theme developer, gscan has been updated so you can test your theme for compatibility against 6.0.

How to get Ghost 6.0

Want to help make the open web better than ever before? We're hiring!

If you like the sound of everything you see here, we're actively hiring for more talented people to join Ghost. We're a fully remote team, located worldwide, with a passion for using technology as a force for good.

Ghost

We’re hiring! Ghost is a proud non-profit organisation building open source technology for fiercely independent, professional publishers.

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