Somebody buys access to your Ghost site. A week later they ask for their money back, or their bank raises a chargeback. What happens to their membership?
Nothing. PayGlue does not act on refund or chargeback events at all. That sounds like a missing feature, and it is worth explaining why it is not one, because the alternative is worse in the cases that matter.
What PayGlue does and does not listen to
PayGlue handles four things a payment provider can tell it: a purchase, a subscription becoming active, a subscription being cancelled and a subscription being revoked. That is the whole list.
A refund is none of those. Neither is a dispute, a chargeback or a partial credit. When a provider sends one, it is recorded and skipped: no error, no retry, no change to the member.
Why not just revoke on refund
Because a refund is a payment decision, and access is an editorial one. They line up less often than you would think.
The most common refund is a goodwill one. A reader on an annual plan has a bad month, asks for something back, and you return two months as a gesture. Automatic revocation would throw them out of a subscription they are still paying for and still want, which is the opposite of what either of you intended.
Partial refunds have no obvious answer at all. Somebody bought a bundle and you refunded one item: which access ends? The provider’s event does not carry an answer, and inventing one means guessing with somebody’s membership.
Chargebacks are worse, because a disputed charge is not a final state. Banks decide against the cardholder often enough that revoking on the dispute means locking out a paying reader for weeks and then writing to explain why. The dispute can also be fraud on the buyer’s own card, in which case the person you locked out did nothing at all.
There is a smaller reason too, and you would meet it on your first afternoon: setting up a provider usually involves buying from yourself and refunding it. That should not quietly delete a member you created on purpose.
The pattern is the same one behind an expired card not being treated as a cancellation: a payment problem is not automatically an access decision, and the two systems answer to different people.
What this means in practice
A refunded reader keeps access. If the purchase was a one-off, they keep it indefinitely. If it was a subscription and you also cancelled it at the provider, the normal cancellation path takes the access away when the subscription actually ends.
That second case covers more situations than people expect. Refunding a subscriber’s last payment usually goes together with cancelling their subscription, and the cancellation is the part PayGlue acts on.
A chargeback leaves everything untouched as well. Your provider will tell you about it, take the money back and probably charge a fee for the trouble, and Ghost knows nothing about any of it.
Nothing is recorded against the member either. The note carries the purchase and, when there is one, the ending. A refund never appears there, which leaves the payment provider as the only place with the full financial story.
Removing access by hand
Two changes in Ghost, and they are exactly what an automatic revocation would do.
- Open the member in Ghost Admin.
- Remove the payglue-active label.
- If the member shows as comped, switch that off.
The first covers sites where the PayGlue overlay does the gating. The second covers sites with Stripe connected, where buyers are marked comped and Ghost’s native gating does the work. Doing both is safe on either kind of site, and there is a full article on what each of those labels means.
A routine that costs two minutes
The gap this leaves is real, so here is how to close it without waiting for software.
Refund and cancel together. If you refund a subscriber and you do want them out, cancel the subscription at the provider in the same session. The cancellation reaches PayGlue and the access ends on its own. This one habit covers most of the cases.
Check refunds when you check payouts. You already look at your provider’s dashboard when money arrives. Refunds are on the same screen. For a one-off purchase you refunded, remove the label while you are there.
Write down what you decided. A refunded reader who keeps access for a good reason is fine. A refunded reader who keeps access because nobody noticed is a slow leak, and the difference is a note.
Would automating it be better
For some publishers, yes, and that is why it would have to be a setting rather than a default.
A software business selling a licence probably wants a refund to end access immediately. A newsletter that refunds a month as goodwill almost certainly does not. A course seller with a thirty-day guarantee sits somewhere in between and wants the refund to end access only for that window.
Those are three different rules, and shipping one of them as an unannounced default would quietly do the wrong thing for two thirds of the people using it. Doing nothing, visibly, is the more honest position until the setting exists.