You install Ghost, open the members section, and it asks you to connect Stripe. There is no second option. If Stripe doesn’t support your country, the feature stops right there, on that screen, behind a button you can’t press.
Plenty of writers hit this. Stripe operates in roughly forty countries. Writers live in all of them, and in every other one too.
Why Ghost only offers Stripe
Ghost built its membership billing straight onto Stripe’s API rather than onto some payment abstraction. Subscriptions, the customer portal, the checkout, the webhook handling: all of it is Stripe objects, referenced by Stripe IDs, sitting in Ghost’s own database schema.
That was a sensible call at the time. It made the feature quick to build and it works beautifully if you happen to live in one of those forty countries. It also made the feature very hard to extend, because adding a second provider would mean rebuilding the data model rather than plugging in an adapter.
So when someone asks which payment provider they can use with Ghost, the answer is one name. If that name isn’t available where you are, the answer is none.
The three routes people take
Search any Ghost forum and the same three suggestions come up, usually in this order.
Route one: open a Stripe account in another country
This gets recommended most often and it’s the one I’d warn about hardest.
The pitch sounds tidy. Register a company in Estonia, the UK or the US, open Stripe there, carry on. There are services that exist purely to sell you this.
What the pitch skips is that Stripe’s terms require the business to be genuinely established in the country of the account, not just registered there. And the shape this workaround creates is the exact shape their review systems watch for: an account in one country, a director living in another, customers concentrated somewhere else again, payouts heading to a foreign bank.
When a review starts, Stripe holds the funds until it finishes. That is your subscribers’ money, and you are the one who has to explain the delay.
Plenty of people run this for years without trouble. Others get frozen in month three, and there is no way to tell in advance which one you are. The downside also arrives at the worst possible moment, when you already have readers paying you every month.
If the money matters to you, I wouldn’t build on it.
Route two: automation glue
Zapier or n8n sitting between a payment provider and Ghost’s Admin API. Payment lands, a Zap fires, the API creates a member with a tier.
For one specific case this is genuinely the right answer: a single one-off purchase that grants permanent access. Somebody buys a course, gets in, and nothing about that ever changes again.
Subscriptions are where it comes apart. A subscription isn’t a single event but a stream of them: renewed, payment failed, retried, recovered, cancelled, expired. Each state needs its own response in Ghost. Providers also retry their webhooks when they don’t get a quick answer, so you need to spot a repeat and avoid acting on it twice.
By then you’re writing a billing state machine inside a tool built for straight lines. It can be done. It’s also the sort of thing that behaves perfectly while you test it, because a test is one clean purchase, and then shows its holes in month two when the first cancellations land.
Route three: use a provider that isn’t Stripe
Polar, Paddle, Lemon Squeezy, Gumroad, Ko-fi, Creem, PayPal and Patreon all operate in places Stripe doesn’t. Several act as merchant of record, which means they handle the VAT filing as well. That’s usually a second problem you already have.
The reason this route stayed theoretical for so long is that Ghost can’t listen to any of them. The payment happens, the provider announces it, and Ghost never hears a thing.
Closing that gap is what PayGlue does. The provider’s event arrives, PayGlue works out which Ghost tier it corresponds to, and Ghost grants access. Ghost’s own Stripe billing stays untouched, so if Stripe ever does open up where you live, nothing you set up here has to be unpicked.
Choosing a provider
There’s no universally right answer here, and it depends far more on where you live than on any feature list.
| If you need | Look at |
|---|---|
| Tax and VAT handled for you | Paddle, Lemon Squeezy, Polar |
| The widest payout country coverage | PayPal |
| The lowest friction to start today | Ko-fi, Gumroad |
| An audience you already have | Patreon |
| Recurring subscriptions as the main model | Polar, Paddle, Lemon Squeezy |
Start with the constraint that actually binds you. Can this provider pay out to a bank account in your country, in a currency you can use? Check that first, before you compare anything else, because a provider with a lovely checkout and no payout route to you isn’t really an option however good it looks on paper.
Once two or three have passed that test, then it’s worth comparing fees, tax handling and how the checkout feels.
What you keep
People often assume they’re trading something away here, so it’s worth saying plainly: moving payment collection elsewhere changes nothing about Ghost itself.
Members, tiers, gated posts, the members-only newsletter and the sign-in flow all work exactly as documented. Your readers see an ordinary Ghost site. The only thing that moves is where the card gets charged.
Frequently asked
Is a foreign Stripe account really that risky? Yes. The terms require the business to be established in the country of the account, and the review triggers are precisely the pattern this workaround creates. You don’t get a warning email first. You get a hold on money you were already counting as revenue.
Do I lose Ghost’s native member features? No. Members, tiers, gated content and newsletters are Ghost features and stay untouched. Only the payment collection moves.
What currency do I bill in? Whatever your provider supports. Ghost never records what a member paid or in which currency, only which tier they hold.
Can I switch providers later? Yes. Members already in Ghost stay as they are. You point the new provider’s webhook at PayGlue, map its products to your tiers, and carry on.
What if Stripe becomes available in my country later? Then you connect it in Ghost as normal and run both. From that point members created through PayGlue are marked as comped in Ghost, which is Ghost’s own complimentary paid status, so the two never fight over the same person. Before that point there is no Stripe account to compare against: access is carried by a label on the member and checked by the paywall script instead. The difference between the two, in detail.