Your Ghost® site, built to fit
Custom themes, membership pages, migrations, integrations. We host most of the sites we build for, so the setup is familiar and nobody disappears after launch. Estimates published below, and most builds run from a couple of weeks to a couple of months.
Working with Ghost since 2018, and looking after about 1,400 sites. One project at a time, so yours gets proper attention.
What we build
Most projects are one of these, or a couple of them together.
Custom themes
Designed around your content, rather than adapted from someone else's template.
Membership and newsletters
Tiers, signup, account pages. The parts that turn a reader into a subscriber.
Archives that grew messy
Years of posts retagged and re-sorted, with redirects that hold. Your old links keep working.
Accessibility
WCAG 2.2 AA on the build, tested with a keyboard and a screen reader, with a statement you can publish. Alt text and headings fixed across the archive you already have, too.
Integrations
Analytics, podcasts, video, events, a print edition. The things Ghost doesn't do on its own.
Small services
Single sign-on, submission forms, anything that needs its own moving parts running alongside Ghost.
And what we'd talk you out of
If you just want a small tweak to your current theme, that's support, not a project. Email help@magicpages.co and we'll usually just do it for you. Somewhere in between? Buy a few hours rather than a package. The packages below start at €2,500.
What it costs
Published, because you shouldn't have to book a call to find out whether you can afford something. Most projects start with a custom theme. These are estimates from work we've done before, not fixed quotes: you pay for the hours actually spent, and we won't pass the estimate without asking you first.
Brand fit
One of our existing themes, set up as yours.
Estimate, about two weeks
Your colours, type and logo throughout
Homepage rearranged around your content
Up to two custom sections
Launch, and a walkthrough for your team
No new design work, which is why it's this price
Custom theme
Designed for your publication from scratch.
Estimate, three to four weeks
A design made for your content, not a colour swap
Six templates: home, post, page, section, author and 404
Your own tags and sections built into the templates
Signup, account and tier pages styled to match
Keyboard operable, contrast checked, quick on a phone
Two rounds of revisions, and a repository you own
Publication build
The theme, plus everything around it.
Estimate, about two months
Everything in the custom theme
Your archive retagged and re-sorted, with redirects that hold
Membership, tiers and newsletters built out properly
The integrations you actually run: analytics, podcast, video, events
Accessibility taken to WCAG 2.2 AA, with a statement you can publish
Training for your team, and a proper handover
Every custom project comes with a year of hosting for the site we build, free from the day it launches. Your build stays with the people who made it, and the first year costs you nothing.
What pushes it higher
Moving from another platform, wiring into a service like your membership or events provider, a contributor flow that works without email addresses, or compliance you have to evidence. Any of those takes a project past the publication build, and a real quote can be double it. They start with a €1,500 discovery, credited in full, and an estimate based on your actual site rather than this page.
Or skip the estimate
Some work can't be scoped in advance, and pretending otherwise wastes everyone's time. Book hours instead, at $100 an hour, and steer it as it goes. Good for changes, experiments, and anything where you'd rather decide what's worth doing once you can see it.
How billing works
A deposit to start, then the hours actually spent, invoiced every two weeks so you can see where it's going. Two rounds of revisions are in every estimate. The code is yours once it's paid for, in a repository you own: Codeberg, GitLab, GitHub or your own server, whichever you prefer. Prices are before VAT.
More than one site?
Some of what we build isn't a theme at all. If you run a network of sites, or you need something your team uses rather than something your readers see, that's a different kind of project.
One theme, every site
Built once, then deployed and kept in step across all of them, so a fix in one place is a fix everywhere.
More than one language
Translation workflows where a machine drafts and a person approves, rather than publishing whatever came back.
A dashboard for your team
One place to see and manage every site, instead of logging into each admin panel in turn.
Who changed what
Roles, permissions, audit trails and encrypted keys, for when more than a couple of people can touch things.
There's no published price for these, because two of them have almost nothing in common. They start with a €1,500 discovery, credited in full, and an estimate based on what you actually run. Software is a different commitment from a theme: it needs a security review, a migration path, documentation, and someone to keep it current afterwards.
How a build goes
Three or four weeks for a theme, about two months for a full publication build. The foundations are already built here, so the accessibility work, the speed work and the deploy setup are not on your bill. Your money goes into your design and the parts specific to you.
Direction
A look at your brand, your content and the templates you actually need. You approve a direction before anything gets built.
Build
It gets built on a staging copy of your site, with your real content in it. You watch it happen instead of waiting for a reveal.
Launch
Two rounds of revisions, then the accessibility and speed checks, then launch. You get the repository, the docs and a recorded walkthrough.
What you'll need to bring
Your brand
Logo, colours and fonts. If you haven't got them, we work with brand and UX designers and you'll see their price up front.
Your content
Real copy and pictures for the pages in the build, not placeholder text.
One person who can say yes
A build slows right down when every decision has to go to a meeting.
A few things Ghost can't do
Ghost is good software with a few hard edges. Better you hear about them now than halfway through a build.
Checkout stays where it is
Payments and billing always run through Ghost Portal and Stripe. Signup, account and tier pages can be built to match your design, but the payment step itself can't be replaced. Not by us, not by anyone.
Accounts need an email address
Members and staff in Ghost are keyed to an email address. If you need contributors without one, that work lives in a small companion app which pushes drafts into Ghost for an editor to look at.
There's no events feature
Same for a print edition page, or a proper podcast feed. All of it can be built, and we've built it. It's a line in the quote rather than a setting somebody forgot to switch on.
The editor can't be changed
Nobody can add buttons or checks inside the Ghost editor. Tools for your writers run as a service next to Ghost, watching what you publish and reporting back.
None of these are dealbreakers. They just change what the answer looks like, and we'd rather say so now.
Why have us do it
We're not going anywhere
An agency hands over a zip file and moves on. Your site lives on our servers, so the same people deploy this and keep it running, and the first year of hosting is on us. When something breaks, you're emailing whoever wrote it.
We can use our own servers
Staging copies of your real site, a deploy pipeline, small services running next to your site for a few euros a year, and a local AI model on our own hardware for jobs where your content shouldn't go near a big-tech service. An agency has to rent or invent all of that.
Ghost since 2018
Magic Pages started in 2023 and now looks after about 1,400 sites, and the themes on our themes page were built here. Long enough to know which bits of Ghost fight back before there's a price on them.
If your project depends on a grant
Funded work has its own rules. Grant money usually can't pay for anything spent before the award lands, and the funder sets the timeline, not us.
So nothing billable starts until your award is confirmed. Until then there's no deposit and no commitment either way, and if the money doesn't come through it hasn't cost you anything. We'll hold a slot for you in the meantime, so a yes doesn't turn into a wait.
What we can do while you're bidding
Write the technical and delivery sections with you, so what you promise your funder is what gets built
Give you a quote split into line items your bid writer can lift straight into a budget
Build the schedule around your funder's end date rather than ours
Tell you when part of your wish list belongs in a different funding stream
Pencil in a slot around your funder's dates, at no cost, so a yes doesn't mean waiting months to start
Questions you might have
No. Most clients are, and it does make things quicker, because your site is already reachable and a staging copy takes minutes. If your site is somewhere else, the build works the same way. There's just an extra step at deploy time.
Yes, if your funder or your procurement process needs one. That comes after a paid discovery, because a fixed number is only safe once we've measured your site properly rather than guessed at it. Otherwise every project runs on an estimate: you pay for the hours actually spent, invoiced every two weeks, and we stop and talk before passing the estimate rather than quietly billing on.
There's usually a wait, sometimes a couple of months, because we only ever run one project at a time. Email us with your deadline and you'll get a straight answer about whether it fits. If your project depends on funding, we can pencil in a slot before the money lands, at no cost.
Small things are support, so you email us like any other customer. Anything bigger is either a care plan from €150 a month, which covers ongoing changes, or a new package if it's a real piece of work.
Yes: WCAG 2.2 AA builds, audits, and a statement you can publish. What we won't sell you is an accessibility overlay widget. They don't fix the underlying code, they get in the way of the tools disabled people already use, and in 2024 more than a thousand sites running one got sued anyway. Fixing it at the source is the only version that works.
Then nothing has happened and nothing is owed. Nothing billable starts before your award is confirmed, and until both sides sign, either of us can walk away at no cost. Helping with the technical part of your bid is free.
Yes. We work with brand and UX designers who are genuinely good, and their price is quoted separately and openly, so you can see what is design and what is build. Plenty of projects come in with a logo and a vague feeling, and that's a fine place to start. If your brand is already settled, we'll just build to it.
Join 1,400+ Publishers Who Chose Magic Pages
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Tell us what you're planning
A few lines is plenty. You'll get a straight answer, including an honest no if it isn't a good fit.
Worth mentioning in the email
Your site, and what's not working about it
What you'd like it to do instead
When you need it live, and why that date
Roughly what you have to spend
A real person reads it, usually the same day
If your project isn't a good fit for us, I'll tell you, and point you at someone better.
Jannis, founder of Magic Pages
