Ghost
👤 John O'Nolan & Hannah Wolfe (John was Deputy Head of WordPress's UI group (2009-11) — he knew the bloat from the inside, and the crowd that hated it.)🌐 sitejohn.onolan.org𝕏
A WordPress core dev, sick of the bloat, mocked up a lean blog — 5,236 Kickstarter backers funded it in hours.
Will it work? · our read
Aligned by charter. The structure is the moat, not the code — any dev can clone a lean CMS. Ghost wins because trust compounds when you legally can't sell out. Rare, and slow.
01How the money moves
Give the CMS away free (MIT open source)
→
Creators want it managed, not self-hosted
→
They pay a flat monthly Ghost(Pro) fee
02The numbers
$10.8M
ARR (live public)
ghost.org
30,349
paying customers
ghost.org
0%
cut of creator revenue
ghost.org
All three come from Ghost's own live public dashboard. ghost.org/about
🔒
The facts are free. The judgment is for members.
You've seen how the money moves, the numbers, and every source — free, on all 365 cases, always. Members get the part you can't look up: why it won · where the moat really is · how it dies · how it beats its rivals — plus the 🚀 launchpad prompt that turns any case into a plan for your business.
Sources stay public, always · cancel anytime · 14-day refund
(demo: preview the full teardown)Sourcesupdated · daily
ghost.org/about — live public financials ($10,818,711 ARR)Kickstarter: Ghost, Just a Blogging Platform (£196,362, 5,236 backers)@JohnONolan: Ghost crossed $10M ARR as a bootstrapped non-profitBaremetrics Founder Chat: launching Ghost as a non-profitGhost Help: 0% transaction fees, creators keep 100%
Revenue is first-party: Ghost publishes a live public financial dashboard at ghost.org/about showing $10,818,711 ARR (about $901K/mo run rate) — we round to $10.8M. Verified true. The 'can never be bought or sold' non-profit structure, the £196,362 / 5,236-backer 2013 Kickstarter, and O'Nolan's Deputy-Head-of-WordPress-UI role (2009-11) are all documented first-party. Note: the about $130M figure is creator earnings on Ghost (GMV-like), NOT Ghost's own revenue — deliberately kept out of the revenue field. Rivals bar weights and competitor prices are our editorial read for comparison, not audited figures. We never score you.