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# How I built my Ghost membership and what it costs to operate
- URL: https://birchtree.me/blog/how-i-built-my-ghost-membership/
- Published: 2024-01-23T15:23:56.000Z
- Updated: 2024-01-23T20:05:15.000Z
- Author: Matt Birchler
- Tags: #Import 2025-03-29 19:29

This isn't going to be a full tutorial, but yesterday I started a paid tier for Birchtree ([sign up here](#/portal/signup)) and in the interest of transparency as well as setting expectations for people who are thinking about doing something similar, here's the broads strokes of what's making this work.

## Services and costs

Five services are being used to make this happen:

- [DigitalOcean](https://www.digitalocean.com/?ref=birchtree.me) is where I host this blog, which has a flat $16.80/month cost
- [Ghost](https://ghost.org/?ref=birchtree.me) is free and open source software running on that DigitalOcean server. There is a Ghost Pro service one can use as well, but this is not that
- [Stripe](https://stripe.com/?ref=birchtree.me) is the payment provider Ghost's built-in membership feature uses, and while I'd love to be able to easily swap in something else, Stripe is what I've got to go with, and they don't have a recurring fee, but they do take about 9% of transactions (this varies by the size of each transaction, the percentage drops as the amount goes up)
- [MailGun](https://www.mailgun.com/?ref=birchtree.me) is what actually sends the emails that go out when a new post is published as well as when you need to get a magic link to log into your account. This is free for up to 1,000 emails per month, and flexes up beyond that, but I've never hit the limit so far 🤞 (Update: it's been brought to my attention that this plan isn't easy to find like it used to be when I signed up a few years ago. [This post](https://nicksdatajourney.com/downgrade-mailgun/?ref=birchtree.me) explains how you should be able to get to it today)
- [Hover](https://hover.com/?ref=birchtree.me) is my go-to for registering domains, and I needed to get a new one for the above emails. I went with birchtree.email, which will cost me $10/year to keep active

This is a lot, and I don't blame anyone who sees this and thinks, "no thank you, that's too much." I will say that Ghost Pro simplifies this a good deal. If I was using Ghost Pro to do this exact same thing, it would be:

- [Ghost Pro](https://ghost.org/pricing/?ref=birchtree.me) varies quite a bit in price, but I'd be on the $11/month plan right now. Ghost Pro would handle emails for me, so no MailGun account would be needed
- Stripe would still be used to process payments, and their take would be the same. Ghost would not take anything additional
- Hover would still need to be in the mix to register the domain

## Some implementation details

Setting this up in Ghost is pretty simple. Here's the page in the Ghost portal that lets me configure what the sign up modal looks like.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/31/25312b2a-2d5b-4d01-ba92-e6755efc202c/content/images/2024/01/portal-settings.jpg)

And here's where I configured those membership details.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/31/25312b2a-2d5b-4d01-ba92-e6755efc202c/content/images/2024/01/tier-settings.jpeg)

And here's the MailGun settings, which is literally just entering the domain and the API key generated in MailGun's interface.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/31/25312b2a-2d5b-4d01-ba92-e6755efc202c/content/images/2024/01/mailgun.jpg)

So yeah, not a real tutorial, but a quick peek behind the scenes at how this works and what services are linked together to make this possible.