How can the Magic Pages lifetime plan be sustainable?

Because the one-time price covers what your site actually costs us to run, and because we keep lifetime plans a deliberately small part of the business. Recurring subscriptions pay for the platform. Lifetime plans sit on top of that, which is exactly what makes them safe to offer.

It's the question we get asked most about lifetime plans, so here's the real arithmetic rather than asking you to take our word for it.

The price is a subscription, paid up front

A lifetime plan costs 30 months of monthly billing, or three years if you'd have paid yearly. That isn't a discount we're hoping to absorb. It's close to how long an average site stays with any host, so it collects up front roughly what you'd have paid us over the same stretch.

Jannis worked out the first version of that number in 2023, before there was any real data to go on, and wrote up the whole calculation:

Lifetime Offers: A Year in Review

An exploration into the lifetime business model of my Ghost hosting service Magic Pages. Why it was the right decision, what struggles I encountered, and why it ultimately was a show-stopper for growth.

Jannis Fedoruk-BetschkiJannis Fedoruk-Betschki

Three years and more than 1,400 publishers later, the math has held up.

Subscriptions pay for the platform

Most sites on Magic Pages are billed monthly or yearly. That revenue covers the dedicated servers your site runs on, the development work, and the team behind the support inbox.

That's the part that keeps the promise safe. A one-time payment from you is a long commitment on our side, and it's a comfortable one to make when recurring revenue already covers the bills. Keeping that balance right is what protects the lifetime plans we've already sold, including yours.

Why availability is limited

Until March 2026 we released ten lifetime plans a month. That number was picked when Magic Pages was much smaller. Now we work it out fresh each month from three things: the balance between lifetime and subscription sites, the health of recurring revenue, and a cap on new commitments.

Some months that means a handful, some months none. Releasing fewer is what lets us keep offering them at all. The pricing section on our homepage shows what's open when you're reading this, and we wrote up the thinking behind the change here:

Smarter Lifetime Plan Availability

Lifetime plans have been one of Magic Pages’ most popular options since launch. You pay once, you’re set – no renewals. That’s a promise Magic Pages takes seriously. But running a hosting platform means thinking long-term. Every lifetime site is one I’m committed to keeping online, maintained,

Magic PagesJannis Fedoruk-Betschki

What "lifetime" means here

The operational lifetime of the service, which is how our terms put it. For as long as Magic Pages runs, your site stays on the plan you bought. No renewal, no subscription, no upgrade pushed on you because your site grew.

We've been running since 2023 and we're built to keep going, so we've also written about the question behind the question:

What if something happened to you, Jannis?

Learn what happens to your Magic Pages Ghost site if something happens to founder Jannis, including continuity plans and documentation.

Magic PagesJannis Fedoruk-Betschki

Two details worth having

The uptime SLA applies to monthly and yearly billing only. Everything else about your plan is identical on lifetime.

Your monthly email allowance works the same as on any billing cycle, and extra emails cost $5 per 10,000 if you go past it.