Before he signed up, a publisher sent me seven questions. They were the kind you ask once you have read the docs and understood the product, and now want to know where it breaks before you put your readers on it.
He is a customer now. Here are his questions and my answers, more or less the way I wrote them back, because if he had them you probably have them too.
1. Can my readers pay with PayPal without creating a PayPal account?
For a one-off purchase, yes. PayPal offers guest checkout with a card, and that works with a Ghost site through PayGlue. The PayPal setup guide covers both kinds of product.
For a subscription, no. A recurring PayPal payment is a billing agreement, and PayPal wants an account behind it. That rule is PayPal’s, and I cannot work around it from my side. So if you sell subscriptions and most of your readers do not have PayPal, PayPal is the wrong provider for that product. A merchant of record like Polar, Paddle or Lemon Squeezy fits better there. You can also run both at once, PayPal for the one-off purchases and another provider for the subscriptions.
2. How reliable is the sync?
A purchase at the provider turns into a Ghost member within seconds. The provider sends a webhook, and I check its signature before anything else happens, so only your provider can trigger a change in your Ghost.
If your Ghost happens to be unreachable at that moment, PayGlue keeps the event and retries it. If it keeps failing, you get an email, because a broken Ghost connection is something you want to hear about before a reader does. The dashboard lists every event with its status and what it did in Ghost. An event that did not grant anything can be replayed once you have fixed whatever was wrong.
3. I already have Stripe in Ghost. Does PayGlue interfere?
No. Ghost keeps talking to Stripe exactly as before, and your Stripe members are untouched.
PayGlue only creates and updates members for purchases at the other providers, and it labels each of them with the provider they came from. In your members list you can tell a Stripe subscriber from a Polar one at a glance. One thing to know: Ghost shows a Stripe-flavoured cancellation notice on members it did not create through Stripe. It is cosmetic, and there is an article about it.
4. What happens to my existing members?
Nothing. PayGlue does not touch a member it did not create. Your existing free and paid members stay as they are.
If you want to move existing members over to a new provider, that is a migration rather than a sync, and it is worth reading what happens to active subscriptions when you switch providers before you start.
5. What if PayGlue is discontinued?
Your members are Ghost members. They live in your Ghost with your labels, and they stay there whatever happens to PayGlue.
The code is open source and you can self-host it. If the hosted service went away, you could run the same thing on your own server, and the guide for that exists today rather than as a promise for later. The only thing that would stop is new purchases turning into new members. Everything that has already been granted stays granted.
6. What if a webhook is lost?
Providers retry webhooks that do not get a successful response, usually for hours or days. On my side every event is processed exactly once, so a retry cannot grant access twice. And if an event never arrives at all, the order is still in the provider’s dashboard, and most providers let you resend the webhook from there. PayGlue then processes it as if it were the first delivery.
In practice I rarely see a webhook go missing. The common case is a webhook that arrives and finds Ghost unreachable, and that one retries on its own.
7. Which provider should I use from India, and how do I know I will get paid?
The checkout is the easy part, because every provider will happily take a reader’s card. The hard part is the payout. Which countries does the provider pay into, and in which currency? What paperwork does it want from you first?
For India, a merchant of record that pays out to Indian accounts is the practical choice, and Paddle and Lemon Squeezy both do. Stripe’s own availability is the reason many publishers end up here in the first place. Whatever you pick, verify the payout before you sell anything. Open the provider’s payout settings, add your bank details and check that your country and currency are accepted. That takes ten minutes and it saves you a bad surprise on the first payout date.
What I took from it
What struck me afterwards is that every one of these questions is about what happens when something goes wrong. A reader without a PayPal account, a webhook that never arrives, a Ghost that cannot be reached, a company that disappears. He did not ask about a single feature.
I think that is the right way to look at a tool that sits between your readers and their access. If you have a question like these, book 30 minutes with me and I will answer it without a pitch. I would rather do that before you sign up than after.