20 ms·

I've never understood the pricing of ghost. I started a personal blog and my first post got almost 50k uniques when it got to the top of /r/programming and the

by iends 10y ago

I've never understood the pricing of ghost. I started a personal blog and my first post got almost 50k uniques when it got to the top of /r/programming and the front page of hacker news. So the pricing model of ghost is problematic because: 1) I don't know what level of plan to buy to support this kind of traffic. 2) $19/mo seems really expensive for a personal blog. (and wouldn't support my traffic load) 3) A $5 instance at DO handled the load really well with room to spare and conservatively took about an hour to setup. So, I guess I'm not their target customer? I want to pay around $10/mo for a hosted blog and support like 500k uniques. There are some wordpress hosts that handle this level of traffic at this price point I think.

halfdan 10y ago
They do a rolling average over three months before they ask you to upgrade. So hitting top spot on reddit or HN once or twice shouldn't be an issue.
- iends 10y ago
  So you're saying I can hit 300k uniques per month for three months before being asked to upgrade to the team plan? Even so, 300k uniques would price you around $80/mo, which seems extremely high to me for a casual blog that can be self hosted on a $5 DO instance and an hours worth of work.
  - pesfandiar 10y ago
    In my opinion, a little bit of it is because of the "hipster premium". The same phenomenon that makes the same food/drink more expensive when served on a cutting board or in a jam jar.
    - jameskegel 10y ago
      I wish the suits from Ghost would weigh in on this, rather than all this conjecture. Can someone from Ghost team give us insight on why there is this disparity other than the obvious "humans must eat"
      - ZenoArrow 10y ago
        Did you not read the article? It spells out the reasoning very clearly. "One key lesson we learned early on was not to charge too little. $5/month customers are just terrible. They have the highest rate of failed payments, the highest rate of credit card fraud, the highest amount of support tickets submitted, and are the least friendly people. We've doubled our prices 3x since then, and each time we do, we get nicer people who value the product more and create fewer problems. At this point I would never create a business ever again which charges less than $10/month."
        EduardoBautista 10y ago
        I wonder if this is why linode avoided the $5 market for so long.
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
  - jhchen 10y ago
    To me setting up a server/installation and maintenance is in the chore category of work so 1hr setup and say 15/min/month maintenance ~= 3 hrs/yr. Good programmer contracts can command $500/hr and the work might actually be fulfilling. 4hrs*$500 = $2000 pays for years of hosting. Also you are not going to hit the top of HN on a regular basis as a casual blogger. Look at real data like your blog's historical traffic in the last year to get an accurate picture of the costs.
    - codingvelocity 10y ago
      $500/hr for a programming contract? Where in the world can you get that kind of contract?
      - maskz 10y ago
        In Monaco only
    - eblanshey 10y ago
      > Good programmer contracts can command $500/hr Ok I know this is possible, but how common is this really? I guess this might be a little bit more typical for very short contracts, like one-off work, but still.
    - iends 10y ago
      This logic breaks down when you realize you can't bill out for 100% of your time, nor do you want to try to because mental health is important.
    - 746F7475 10y ago
      Is that $500/h freelancer/contractor fee? Because that seems absurdly high for someone on a payroll no matter how much of a rockstar they are. If so, then you have to factor in all the non-billable hours you spend getting clients/contracts, advertising, and general housekeeping required to run a company. Then stuff like health care, car, phone, computer, electricity, office and other expenses. Just saying that you can't just say: "my time is worth $500/hr" if that's what you bill for 4 hours a day for a client for few weeks.
baldfat 10y ago
I find models like nearlyfreespeech.net where you pre-pay to be perfect for friends and family for situations where they have no idea if it will even leave the ground.
mattferderer 10y ago
Their pricing didn't make sense for what I wanted either. I wanted to set up two very low traffic blogs that may some day get real traffic. So as any developer would do, I spent much more money when considering my billing rate per hour in making my own version. I have a couple Ghost blogs set up with Docker, Let's Encrypt SSL & NGINX that run on AWS. It works great for me but I haven't taken the time to open source it yet because I very slightly modified the Ghost code to play nicer on AWS. I'm also using the SQLite database which may not be ideal for everyone but it prevents me from having to pay to use multiple "real" databases from AWS. The perks are that it is really quick & easy to add multiple blog sites. Each one lives in its own Docker container. It's also very fast on the AWS free tier. Since it's on Docker, I can boot it up anywhere very quickly as well. If anyone is interested in working with me on improving it, I'll gladly push it to a public GitHub repo.
- iends 10y ago
  I'd take a look. I'm curious about what you tweaked to the code?
  - mattferderer 10y ago
    I originally put this on GitHub when I started. Then I ended up doing a bunch of work & hosting it on BitBucket to a private repo while I was learning Docker & Ghost. I was trying to prevent any accidental leaks of secret keys or passwords. This linked repo has my Ghost changes in it. I added ghost-storage-adapter-s3 to package.json so that the files would be stored on s3 instead. I think the only other change to Ghost I made is purely optional & was done out of my taste. That was to remove the date directory appended to file uploads. https://github.com/mattferderer/ghost-blog/commit/7d373913a5c239f8bbd7f4abfe84a81dddcc9bc2 https://github.com/mattferderer/ghost-blog/commit/7d373913a5... I understand why they did that, I just didn't like it. It may have also caused issues with my AWS S3 but I can't remember.
- simplehuman 10y ago
  Very cool. I was actually looking into a platform for this and ended up with cloudron.io. they are open source as well and basically do what you have done.
tyingq 10y ago
There does seem to be room for someone to swoop in and become the more obvious managed ghost hosting provider. The code itself appears to have a very liberal license, so no issues there, even if you to want to extend some things to allow better multi-tenant support and don't want to release your code. And there is some obvious value add in someone that can simplify things like https setup, version upgrades, security patches, and the like.
debacle 10y ago
WP Engine also "looks" really expensive, but when you start looking at the time value you get for accidentally scaling, it's clearly appealing to many customers.
- iends 10y ago
  The problem for me isn't really $20/mo. It's $20/mo for 50k views, which is nothing.

by iends 10y ago

halfdan 10y ago

They do a rolling average over three months before they ask you to upgrade. So hitting top spot on reddit or HN once or twice shouldn't be an issue.

iends 10y ago
So you're saying I can hit 300k uniques per month for three months before being asked to upgrade to the team plan? Even so, 300k uniques would price you around $80/mo, which seems extremely high to me for a casual blog that can be self hosted on a $5 DO instance and an hours worth of work.
- pesfandiar 10y ago
  In my opinion, a little bit of it is because of the "hipster premium". The same phenomenon that makes the same food/drink more expensive when served on a cutting board or in a jam jar.
  - jameskegel 10y ago
    I wish the suits from Ghost would weigh in on this, rather than all this conjecture. Can someone from Ghost team give us insight on why there is this disparity other than the obvious "humans must eat"
    - ZenoArrow 10y ago
      Did you not read the article? It spells out the reasoning very clearly. "One key lesson we learned early on was not to charge too little. $5/month customers are just terrible. They have the highest rate of failed payments, the highest rate of credit card fraud, the highest amount of support tickets submitted, and are the least friendly people. We've doubled our prices 3x since then, and each time we do, we get nicer people who value the product more and create fewer problems. At this point I would never create a business ever again which charges less than $10/month."
      - EduardoBautista 10y ago
        I wonder if this is why linode avoided the $5 market for so long.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
- jhchen 10y ago
  To me setting up a server/installation and maintenance is in the chore category of work so 1hr setup and say 15/min/month maintenance ~= 3 hrs/yr. Good programmer contracts can command $500/hr and the work might actually be fulfilling. 4hrs*$500 = $2000 pays for years of hosting. Also you are not going to hit the top of HN on a regular basis as a casual blogger. Look at real data like your blog's historical traffic in the last year to get an accurate picture of the costs.
  - codingvelocity 10y ago
    $500/hr for a programming contract? Where in the world can you get that kind of contract?
    - maskz 10y ago
      In Monaco only
  - eblanshey 10y ago
    > Good programmer contracts can command $500/hr Ok I know this is possible, but how common is this really? I guess this might be a little bit more typical for very short contracts, like one-off work, but still.
  - iends 10y ago
    This logic breaks down when you realize you can't bill out for 100% of your time, nor do you want to try to because mental health is important.
  - 746F7475 10y ago
    Is that $500/h freelancer/contractor fee? Because that seems absurdly high for someone on a payroll no matter how much of a rockstar they are. If so, then you have to factor in all the non-billable hours you spend getting clients/contracts, advertising, and general housekeeping required to run a company. Then stuff like health care, car, phone, computer, electricity, office and other expenses. Just saying that you can't just say: "my time is worth $500/hr" if that's what you bill for 4 hours a day for a client for few weeks.

baldfat 10y ago

I find models like nearlyfreespeech.net where you pre-pay to be perfect for friends and family for situations where they have no idea if it will even leave the ground.

mattferderer 10y ago

Their pricing didn't make sense for what I wanted either. I wanted to set up two very low traffic blogs that may some day get real traffic. So as any developer would do, I spent much more money when considering my billing rate per hour in making my own version. I have a couple Ghost blogs set up with Docker, Let's Encrypt SSL & NGINX that run on AWS. It works great for me but I haven't taken the time to open source it yet because I very slightly modified the Ghost code to play nicer on AWS. I'm also using the SQLite database which may not be ideal for everyone but it prevents me from having to pay to use multiple "real" databases from AWS. The perks are that it is really quick & easy to add multiple blog sites. Each one lives in its own Docker container. It's also very fast on the AWS free tier. Since it's on Docker, I can boot it up anywhere very quickly as well. If anyone is interested in working with me on improving it, I'll gladly push it to a public GitHub repo.

iends 10y ago
I'd take a look. I'm curious about what you tweaked to the code?
- mattferderer 10y ago
  I originally put this on GitHub when I started. Then I ended up doing a bunch of work & hosting it on BitBucket to a private repo while I was learning Docker & Ghost. I was trying to prevent any accidental leaks of secret keys or passwords. This linked repo has my Ghost changes in it. I added ghost-storage-adapter-s3 to package.json so that the files would be stored on s3 instead. I think the only other change to Ghost I made is purely optional & was done out of my taste. That was to remove the date directory appended to file uploads. https://github.com/mattferderer/ghost-blog/commit/7d373913a5c239f8bbd7f4abfe84a81dddcc9bc2 https://github.com/mattferderer/ghost-blog/commit/7d373913a5... I understand why they did that, I just didn't like it. It may have also caused issues with my AWS S3 but I can't remember.
simplehuman 10y ago
Very cool. I was actually looking into a platform for this and ended up with cloudron.io. they are open source as well and basically do what you have done.

tyingq 10y ago

There does seem to be room for someone to swoop in and become the more obvious managed ghost hosting provider. The code itself appears to have a very liberal license, so no issues there, even if you to want to extend some things to allow better multi-tenant support and don't want to release your code. And there is some obvious value add in someone that can simplify things like https setup, version upgrades, security patches, and the like.

debacle 10y ago

WP Engine also "looks" really expensive, but when you start looking at the time value you get for accidentally scaling, it's clearly appealing to many customers.

iends 10y ago
The problem for me isn't really $20/mo. It's $20/mo for 50k views, which is nothing.