Today @Ghost crossed $10M ARR, as a bootstrapped non-profit foundation building open source software. Indie publisher revenue earned with Ghost now ~$130M, and accelerating. The world of technology is shifting rapidly, and so is the world of media, creators and journalism. It's hard to keep up with, and even harder to predict. My strong belief, though, is that open software that you own and control is going to be even more important and relevant in the future than it is now. So we're going to keep building it.

What did horse ebooks see

experimenting with a media library for @ghost (WIP)

Going to start selling an ebook called “Why this doesn’t work” and send it to every Hormozi follower that ends their mindless carbon copy cold emails with “worth a quick chat?”

Annual @stripe sessions conf this year was very good. Main takeaways for me - we’re about to get a lot more small businesses, and a lot more customers that aren’t humans. The intersection of those two is going to be fascinating and full of opportunities.

Recording a cheeky @stripe pint with @jrfarr

On this day, 13y ago, @ghost started as an idea on kickstarter 5,000 people backed the project to help bring it to life and support the future of media and journalism Today, Ghost has generated over $150M for independent publishers all over the world kickstarter.com/projects/joh…

Lots of publishing platforms claim to be independent and open. Ghost actually is. 🪷

In SF for @stripe Sessions again this year - say hi if you’re around!

Every time Substack make a move that serves the business, they disingenously play it off as something that's in the best interest of users. > [Email is getting less reliable, so we had to build an app.] "I know I've said this a lot, but I cannot emphasize enough that email will continue to become less deterministically reliable as a means for distributing your work; this is a huge part of why we got into the app and feed business!" Sure. And there's also the economics. One of the largest overheads for any newsletter platform is email delivery — it's expensive, and it scales linearly with subscribers. Delivering the same content by API to an app you own is essentially free, and keeps users inside your ecosystem. The app isn't some reluctant response to problematic technology, it's just a better business. That would be perfectly fine to say out loud. Instead it's "email is unreliable, actually" - a pretty stark reversal of how they used to talk about email. Substack CEO in 2018: "[Email is] the one channel that you have as an independent writer to reach a reader base that’s not directly mediated by a third party. It doesn’t have a Facebook algorithm deciding what people are going to see." In 2026: email is bad, and the answer is the Substack app, mediated by the Substack algorithm deciding what people are going to see. Yes, email is more complicated than it used to be, but there are thousands of newsletter platforms out there, and only one of them is insisting that the only solution to reliable distribution is using their branded app. > [Nobody feels locked into Substack.] "I saw several wags speculate that this was because we were trying to achieve 'lock in' at the behest of our investors. Brother, if you've ever heard of someone who feels locked-in to Substack because of their follow graph, please tell me." The lock-in is not the follow graph. That's a complete strawman. People feel locked in because mobile paid subscriptions are literally locked in. Subscriptions started on the web sit in the writer's own Stripe account — portable, owned, migratable. Subscriptions started inside the Substack app are permanently stuck on Substack. Which, ofc, is conveniently "[just how mobile works, Apple make us do it]" - but publishers don't even have an option to disable paid subscriptions through the Substack app, they are forced into using it. We migrate people off Substack to @Ghost every week. One of the top complaints is "I need to get out before any more of my revenue gets locked into the Substack app." Substack is a venture-backed platform optimising for retention, unit economics, and platform dependency. That is a perfectly normal thing for a venture-backed platform to do. Just say what you're actually doing and stop trying to dress it up as something else.

Experimenting with some AI-assisted features in @Ghost for helping with generated structured data and site administration Kinda fun. Not sure what the UI should be. Don't really want to have to click a button, would be even better if it just happened in the background

Recent fun contributing to a fellow OSS project ❤️

Interesting side effect of running a large open source project these days is that when AI labs want to test their new security scanning features, they use you to do it! Very grateful this was responsibly disclosed so we could immediately resolve. (Aside: the assertion that the project has “[never had a critical vulnerability in its 20 year history]” is not correct. @ghost has been around for 13yrs and it has had vulnerabilities found by security researchers and fixed by us, long before AI, just like any other project)

niche Q but does anyone else use pnpm betterauth and find that it OOMs Renovate runs on lockfile refresh?

The quality of revelations coming out of YC partners in 2026 is truly incredible

Only realised after posting: Time from $9M→$10M ARR was 14 weeks Which is especially wild when you consider the first $1M ARR took 5 years 😅