Ghost

Ghost is an open-source publishing platform that ships with newsletter sending and paid memberships. Self-host on your own infrastructure or use Ghost Pro. Great fit for publishers who want to own their stack.

At an early stage the deciding factors are what the free tier actually covers, what the first paid invoice looks like, and how much of a founding engineer's week the setup costs. Feature depth that only matters at a million sends a month is noise until it is not.

Against a waitlist, a launch announcement, onboarding email, and the first transactional sends, Ghost covers developer experience, scheduling, SDK breadth, and webhook coverage, and does not cover operating track record. Whether that gap matters depends on how central those are to the build.

• Free tier: Self-hosted is free (your infra cost)
• Best published rate per 1,000: Tiers not published in comparable form
• Starts at: Ghost Pro from $9/mo
• DX score: 7/10
• Deliverability: Depends on the SMTP provider configured (often Mailgun for Pro).
• Operating since: 2013
• Scheduling: Yes
• SDKs: node
• Webhooks: Yes

Depends on the SMTP provider configured (often Mailgun for Pro).

Independent publishers who want to own their content and stack.