beehiiv vs Ghost

Ghost is cheaper on paper, and that is not the whole story

Ghost(Pro) Starter is $18 a month billed yearly against beehiiv $43, so Ghost looks like less than half the price. But Starter caps at 1,000 members, and the tiers above it are priced by member count. beehiiv Scale is flat to 100,000 subscribers.

So the comparison inverts as you grow. At 500 members Ghost is much cheaper. At 20,000 you are on a Ghost tier well above beehiiv flat fee. Work out your cost at the list size you expect in eighteen months, not the one you have today.

Self-hosting genuinely is close to free, but budget your own time honestly. Updates, backups, email deliverability and a mail provider are all now your job, and deliverability in particular is a specialism that quietly destroys newsletters that get it wrong.

What ownership actually buys you

Nobody can change the terms on you. No platform decides your newsletter breaches a policy, no percentage appears on revenue that used to be yours, and no acquisition changes the product underneath you. For a publication you intend to run for a decade, that is worth more than a feature list.

You also get real control of the front end. Ghost themes are code, so your site can look like precisely what you want rather than a variation on a template. If your publication is a brand rather than a mailing list, that matters.

What Ghost simply does not do

There is no ad network. If sponsorship is your revenue model, you are selling it yourself: finding advertisers, setting rates, invoicing and chasing. beehiiv does that matching for you, and at small scale that is the difference between having sponsorship revenue and not.

There is no recommendation engine or boost marketplace either. Ghost growth comes from your SEO, your social, your existing audience. That is fine if you already have distribution and a poor deal if you are starting cold.

Ghost is also a heavier tool to run. Even on Ghost(Pro) there is more setup, and self-hosted there is meaningfully more. If you would rather spend that time writing, notice that about yourself before committing.

A reasonable way to decide

If you already have an audience and you are moving it somewhere permanent, Ghost is a strong and principled choice. You are not buying growth, you are buying the end of paying rent on your own publication.

If you are building an audience from a standing start and want the newsletter to fund itself, beehiiv growth and sponsorship tooling is doing work you would otherwise do by hand, badly, for a year.