The open source product that generates $100M+ for creators
Networked publishing with ActivityPub, deeply integrated native analytics, a huge number of improvements, and $100M+ earned by indie publishers. Our biggest-ever release. The most exciting thing on PH today that has nothing to do with AI. Probably.
What’s up hunters! It’s been a while ✌️
I’m excited to share our latest major version release, Ghost 6.0, which the whole team has been working incredibly hard on.
The TLDR: We’re shipping two of our most-requested features ever
Deeply integrated networked publishing on top of an open web protocol called ActivityPub, meaning Ghost publishers can now follow and interact with one another — as well as people across Bluesky, Mastodon, Threads, WordPress, Flipboard, and more.
And we’ve built a native analytics suite into the core of Ghost, to give creators and publishers more data than ever before about their audience and their business.
I’m also excited to share a recent milestone: Creators and publishers have now earned more than $100,000,000 from premium subscriptions, powered by Ghost.
For those of you who can remember back that far, our first ever launch on PH was in 2014.
Back then, it was just me and my co-founder Hannah, shipping our first ‘real’ version of a prototype new blogging platform off the back of a Kickstarter campaign. Our MRR was ~$3k, and we had little more than hopes and dreams about what our open source publishing platform might someday turn into. Here’s how the website looked back then:
https://web.archive.org/web/2014...
A decade later, Ghost has evolved from a basic blogging tool into a powerful publishing platform that’s brought the business model that worked so well for SaaS startups to publishers and creators. While the media industry as a whole is in turmoil, there’s a rising tide of independent creators who are doing better than ever — earning recurring revenue directly from their audience, with a tech stack they own and control.
While a lot has changed, the most important things are still the same as ever:
We’re still a proud, bootstrapped non-profit organization. We still release all our software as free and open source, under an MIT license. We’re still a fully remote team, spread all over the world. And we still care deeply about using technology as a force for good.
If you remember Ghost from the early days, thanks for being part of the journey! If you’re just hearing about us today for the first time, hopefully this got you curious.
Either way, I hope you’ll consider checking out what we’ve been working on.
Full changelog here:
https://ghost.org/changelog/6/
If you want to chat or you have any questions, I’ll be hanging out today in the comments 💬
About Ghost 6.0 on Product Hunt
“The open source product that generates $100M+ for creators”
Ghost 6.0 launched on Product Hunt on August 4th, 2025 and earned 315 upvotes and 35 comments, placing #5 on the daily leaderboard. Networked publishing with ActivityPub, deeply integrated native analytics, a huge number of improvements, and $100M+ earned by indie publishers. Our biggest-ever release. The most exciting thing on PH today that has nothing to do with AI. Probably.
On the analytics side, Ghost 6.0 competes within Writing, Analytics, GitHub and Social Networking — topics that collectively have 273.4k followers on Product Hunt. The dashboard above tracks how Ghost 6.0 performed against the three products that launched closest to it on the same day.
Who hunted Ghost 6.0?
Ghost 6.0 was hunted by John O'Nolan. A “hunter” on Product Hunt is the community member who submits a product to the platform — uploading the images, the link, and tagging the makers behind it. Hunters typically write the first comment explaining why a product is worth attention, and their followers are notified the moment they post. Around 79% of featured launches on Product Hunt are self-hunted by their makers, but a well-known hunter still acts as a signal of quality to the rest of the community. See the full all-time top hunters leaderboard to discover who is shaping the Product Hunt ecosystem.
John O'Nolan