GitHubPayGlue
Where this actually came from
The honest version: I run a Ghost blog and wanted to accept payments through a provider that wasn’t Stripe. Ghost made that impossible without custom code. So I built PayGlue to solve my own problem, then realized the wall I’d hit wasn’t mine alone. Other Ghost creators were running into the exact same thing, quietly, and most of them had just given up or were doing it manually. PayGlue is the tool I built for myself, now open source.
How this happened
The closed beta did what closed betas are supposed to do. It proved the product works in real conditions, with real Ghost sites and real payment providers, without breaking things that weren’t supposed to break. More importantly, it showed that the problem I built this to solve is not a niche edge case. Ghost creators genuinely hit this wall, and there genuinely wasn’t a clean solution before this.
Once that was clear, open sourcing became obvious. Not as a marketing move. Not as a growth strategy. As the most honest way to say: this is what I built, here is exactly how it works, go and see for yourself. No privacy page or trust badge does what a public codebase does.
What’s in the repo
v0.1.0 ships everything that makes PayGlue work end-to-end:
Ghost integration, three live payment providers (Polar, Lemon Squeezy, PayPal), the dashboard, and the webhook proxy. Everything that’s been running in closed beta is in there.
The repo has no hard dependency on any specific cloud provider. PostgreSQL, Redis, and the auth layer can each run on whatever infrastructure you already use or prefer. The README lists some sensible options for each if you’re starting from scratch.
Mollie, Paddle, and Gumroad are in development. Digistore24 and CopeCart are planned. They’ll follow as separate releases.
If you want to run this yourself, SETUP.md has the full guide for Ghost, Polar, Lemon Squeezy, PayPal, and Cloudflare Workers. Self-hosting is free, no license fee.
See it live before you set anything up
Everything PayGlue does is running on this blog right now. If you want to see the product before touching a config file, here’s where to look:
| Demo | What it shows |
|---|---|
| Full pricing table | Embedded in a Ghost post, live sandbox checkout |
| Paywall in action | How this blog gates content with PayGlue |
| Three buttons, one dashboard | Embedded payment links in Ghost |
| go.payglue.io/membership | Production German tech blog using PayGlue live |
The last one is worth clicking. It’s not a sandbox, it’s a real Ghost publication using PayGlue in production.
The license
BUSL 1.1, converting to Apache 2.0 in 2030. The short version: you can read it, run it, modify it, and self-host it today. Commercial use of the hosted version stays with PayGlue for now. In 2030 the full Apache license kicks in automatically, no action needed on your side.
I picked BUSL because it is honest about what this is: a small project that has to stay viable to keep shipping. Pure MIT or Apache today would mean anyone could resell a hosted version on launch day, before there was a business to speak of. BUSL threads that needle, and it’s been used by real projects like MariaDB and HashiCorp for the same reason.
A thank you that actually means something
Every beta tester, waitlist signup, and early adopter who sent feedback shaped what v0.1.0 is. The JWT algorithm mismatch caught in production, the edge cases around webhook replay, the onboarding steps that were one click too many: none of that gets fixed without people willing to use an unfinished product and say what broke.
This release is as much yours as mine.
Contributing, and what’s in it for you
The repo is open for contributions: new payment provider adapters, bug fixes, documentation improvements. Polar and Lemon Squeezy are the cleanest reference adapters to follow if you want to add a new provider.
If you build something and want to contribute it back, reach out at team@payglue.io. Contributors who want to run PayGlue on their own Ghost site using the hosted infrastructure get a goodie. I will leave that deliberately vague for now.
What stays the same
The hosted version at payglue.io is still in closed beta. The waitlist is open if you want early access. Pricing, onboarding, and the hosted infrastructure aren’t changing with this release; open source is an addition, not a pivot.
I am still building. Now you can watch exactly how.