I spent half an hour talking to Jannis Fedoruk-Betschki, who runs Magic Pages, for The Magic Pages Podcast about why PayGlue exists and how it actually behaves once it’s running. You can listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever else you get your podcasts, and the transcript is up on the episode page too. This is the shorter, written version of the same conversation, for anyone who’d rather read than listen.
The Magic Pages PodcastS01 · E06
Why I built this in the first place
The honest answer is that I didn’t set out to build a company. I started with Ghost three years ago, and I don’t like Stripe. Not because it’s broken. It works fine for a lot of people. I just don’t enjoy building on it, and I kept running into the same wall every time a reader in a country Stripe doesn’t serve tried to pay me.
That’s a bigger problem than it sounds. Stripe covers 50 countries. Writers live in all of them, and in every other one too. I later tried to put a number on how many Ghost sites that leaves out and only got part of the way. Someone in Nigeria wanting to subscribe to a Ghost site has no native option at all, and “open a foreign Stripe account” is advice I actively warn people against, because it violates Stripe’s own terms and the reviews that catch it tend to land at the worst possible time, with subscriber money on hold.
So PayGlue started as me solving my own problem, and it stayed that way longer than I expected before it turned into something other people wanted too.
Processor or merchant of record, and why it matters
One thing Jannis and I got into that doesn’t come up enough: not every provider PayGlue connects to plays the same role. Stripe is a payment processor. You take the money, you’re responsible for figuring out and remitting VAT yourself. Paddle, by contrast, acts as merchant of record, meaning the sale legally happens through them and they handle the tax filing on your behalf.
That distinction sounds like fine print until you’re the one filing VAT returns across a dozen jurisdictions. If you’d rather not think about it, a merchant-of-record provider takes that off your plate entirely. If you want more control over pricing and reporting, a processor gives you that at the cost of doing the tax work yourself. Neither is wrong, but people often don’t realize they’re choosing between the two until they’ve already picked a provider for other reasons.
What Ghost and Stripe don’t let you do
Ghost’s native billing, tied directly to Stripe, is built around one shape: a fixed-price recurring subscription. That’s most of what people need, but not all of it. Pay-what-you-want subscriptions, one-time purchases that grant permanent access, straightforward donations with no tier attached: none of that fits the native flow, and I hear from people who want exactly one of those three regularly.
That’s most of what PayGlue adds on top of what Ghost already does well. It doesn’t touch members, tiers, gated posts, or Ghost’s own newsletter. It replaces one thing: the paywall itself, as an HTML snippet you drop in instead of Ghost’s built-in one, so a payment from any connected provider can grant or revoke access the same way a Stripe payment would.
The 2am webhook, and what it actually costs you
Jannis asked about failure modes, and I gave him the real one instead of a reassuring one. A provider sends a webhook, your server is briefly down or slow to answer, the event doesn’t land, and Ghost never finds out someone paid. The customer sees no access, assumes something’s wrong, and cancels. You didn’t lose a webhook. You lost a paying member who was happy thirty seconds earlier.
That’s why most of what’s gone into PayGlue since the early version isn’t features, it’s retries, logging, and a status page you can actually check when something feels off. A payment tool that quietly drops events under load isn’t a payment tool, it’s a liability with a nice dashboard.
Why you don’t have to take my word for any of this
I brought up something Jannis clearly cares about too, given how Magic Pages talks about GDPR on its own site: you shouldn’t have to trust a vendor’s claims about what their software does with your data. PayGlue is open source. You can read the code that handles a webhook before you ever connect a real payment provider to it, fork it, run it locally on your own machine, and see for yourself. Data stays on EU infrastructure, and there’s a data processing agreement for anyone who needs one on file. None of that replaces reading the code, it just means the paperwork exists if your organization needs it.
Why there’s no free tier
Magic Pages dropped its own starter tier a while back, and I’ve never had one either, so this came up naturally. A free tier is an easy way to get a thousand signups. It’s also a thousand accounts pulling on infrastructure, support time, and attention, funded by nobody. I’d rather charge a fair price from the start and be around in three years than optimize for a signup number that looks good in a screenshot.
The providers, if you’re choosing
By the end we ran through the list PayGlue connects to: Polar, Paddle, Lemon Squeezy, Gumroad, Ko-fi, Creem, Patreon, and PayPal, alongside Stripe itself for anyone who wants to run both. None of them is the universally correct choice. Which one fits depends on where your readers are, whether you want someone else handling VAT, and how much you already have built on a particular audience. I wrote a longer comparison of the routes people take here, if you want the fuller version.
Thanks to Jannis for having me on. Magic Pages has been thinking about Ghost hosting, and about being straightforward with the people who use it, for a lot longer than I’ve been building payment tools for the platform, and it showed in the questions. Go listen to the whole thing on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or any other podcast app, the transcript’s there too if reading suits you better.