PayGlue

Ghost publishers who want to sell memberships or gate content are natively limited to Stripe for payments. Stripe is not available in every country, so creators lose members in markets where it doesn't work. Stripe is also just a payment processor, not a merchant of record, meaning the creator is personally responsible for calculating and remitting VAT, sales tax, and digital goods tax in every country a customer pays from. Ghost also only supports one payment type per tier, so creators can't mix free, one-time, and subscription options or run multiple providers for different markets or use cases without custom developer work.

PayGlue is a relay layer that bridges other payment providers (Polar, PayPal, Paddle, Gumroad, Lemon Squeezy, Ko-fi, Creem, and more in development) into Ghost while leaving an existing Ghost + Stripe setup untouched and running in parallel. Creators paste a generated JS snippet into Ghost's header code injection and add a buy button, paywall, or pricing table anywhere on a page; when a customer pays through the connected provider's checkout, PayGlue verifies the webhook and calls the Ghost Admin API to grant a comped membership identical to a manual tier grant. It deduplicates webhook events by fingerprint and routes failed ones to a replay queue instead of losing them, and it never touches Ghost core, plugins, or themes, and never sees card numbers or bank details since checkout stays on the provider's own page. Its pricing table and paywall features let creators mix free, one-time, and subscription tiers in a single table and point each tier at a different provider, something Ghost cannot do natively.

Ghost only supports Stripe natively, which excludes creators in countries Stripe doesn't serve and puts full tax remittance burden on the creator; merchant-of-record providers like Polar or Paddle handle VAT and sales tax automatically, which PayGlue makes usable inside Ghost without migrating away from Stripe.