Ghost memberships beyond Stripe

About this episode

André is the founder of PayGlue, a payment-middleware relay that connects Ghost memberships to alternatives to Stripe — Polar, Paddle, Lemon Squeezy, Creem, Gumroad, Ko-fi, Patreon and more. He built it to solve his own problem (he simply didn't like Stripe), then found the deeper ones: creators in countries where Stripe isn't available, and the merchant-of-record question of who actually remits your tax.

André and Jannis get into how PayGlue replaces Ghost's paywall with a snippet so any provider can grant access, pay-what-you-want and one-time memberships, and what happens when a webhook fails at 2 a.m. The second half is two founders comparing notes: earning trust through open source, GDPR as a filter for tools that actually care, why a sustainable tool skips the free tier, and the nerve it took to remove the Magic Pages starter tier.

Chapters

• 0:00 — Welcome — meet André and PayGlue
• 0:31 — Solving his own problem: disliking Stripe
• 1:51 — When Stripe isn't an option (country restrictions)
• 3:55 — Payment processor vs merchant of record
• 4:53 — Why Magic Pages avoids Stripe too
• 5:37 — One-time payments, donations, and pay-what-you-want
• 10:04 — Replacing the Ghost paywall with a snippet
• 10:37 — Metered paywalls — a listener's use case
• 14:29 — Trust and open source
• 16:32 — When it fails: the 2 a.m. webhook
• 19:20 — "What if you disappear tomorrow?"
• 23:04 — GDPR as a filter — DPAs and subprocessor lists
• 26:25 — Why there's no free tier
• 27:33 — Removing the Magic Pages starter tier
• 29:40 — Pricing tiers, and roles for teams
• 34:59 — Which payment providers PayGlue supports
• 38:32 — A discount for Magic Pages customers, and wrap-up

Links & mentions

• PayGlue — André's payment middleware for Ghost memberships
• Ghost — the platform PayGlue plugs into
• Stripe — the default Ghost payment integration PayGlue works around
• Polar — merchant-of-record provider
• Paddle — merchant-of-record provider
• Lemon Squeezy — merchant-of-record provider
• Creem — merchant-of-record provider
• Gumroad
• Ko-fi
• Patreon — used by some creators as an access source into their Ghost site
• n8n — the automation tool André duct-taped before building PayGlue

Transcript

Auto-generated with Whisper + pyannote speaker diarization. Names and technical terms have been hand-corrected; sentence boundaries are approximate.

Jannis: Hi, and welcome to the Magic Pages podcast, where we sit down with the people building, hosting, and publishing on Ghost. I'm Jannis, and today I'm here with André, the founder of PayGlue, a payment middleware that connects Ghost sites to Stripe alternatives. André, welcome.

André: Yes, thank you very much for having me here in your podcast.

Jannis: André, can you quickly introduce yourself and tell people who you are and how you came to create PayGlue as a new tool for the Ghost ecosystem?

André: Yes, of course. I solved my own problem. I started three years ago with Ghost, and I dislike Stripe, not because it's not working, only because I don't like Stripe very much. And so I looked for an option to resolve my problem and use another payment provider. And it wasn't really easy for me because there only were manual links to do around it with the API or Make or n8n that works a little bit. And when there are some problems, then you have a lot to do in searching why it isn't working. And so I was looking for a problem solver, a sort of webhook middleware relay that helps me out.

So I built my little product to solve my own problem. And as it was solved, I thought maybe another Ghost publisher needs this tool.

Jannis: Now that you've talked to a couple of people about PayGlue and you have a couple of paying customers already, what did you find apart from your own problem of disliking Stripe? What were some of their problems? Are there other problems with how Ghost and Stripe work together or don't work together in some cases where you say people would need an alternative to Stripe itself for Ghost memberships?

André: I found the problem is not Stripe itself. In some countries, you can't use Stripe. Your country is maybe not allowed in Stripe and you can't make an account. And so you can use Ghost of course with free membership tier. That solves not every problem for a publisher who wants to make some memberships with it. And so they change to other systems like WordPress or something else. And I found out in my country, in Germany, it's no problem with Stripe and other countries don't like Stripe or you can use it.

So I thought for myself, okay, when somebody needs to use Stripe, it should work with PayGlue. And when somebody don't have the option to use Stripe, it should work too, because when you don't use Stripe, you don't have the paid membership tiers and every article is free. So how you compete this with a payment that somebody does and for exclusive articles. So the PayGlue problem at first was only to solving the payment and ghost memberships problem. And now it solves a paywall too. So that users without Stripe connection can use a paywall to get exclusive content.

Jannis: Cool. Can you tell us some of the countries where Stripe isn't available? Do you have any countries in mind?

André: I have a beta tester from Nigeria and there was this problem first. And. I have a beta tester from, who's the country name? I don't get the name, but. I have another country too that doesn't work well with Stripe. They were declined. They could make an account, but they were declined for Stripe. They said, oh no, we don't want to work with you and process your payments. And that was not only the only problem. For example, when you are a solo founder, you make solo publishing and you have cool stuff that somebody wants to read and pay for and you use Stripe. Most people don't know the difference between a payment processor and a merchant of record.

Because Stripe only does like paper, the payments and transactions, but you are responsible for tax remitments and everything else. And that don't come in first place. That comes later. For example, when the tax department sends you a letter and you have to strip it out. What was taxed from this country and this country and this country. Everybody knows this from digital payments. For example, an ebook. Yeah, you take a provider like Gumroad, for example, and they remit the tax for you no matter if somebody buys from the use air from England or from the EU. And because Stripe doesn't do that and. I have a beta tester that said, hey, for my own business purpose, I need a payment provider that works as a merchant of record too. So I set it up.

Jannis: Yeah, that's actually one of the reasons why Magic Pages doesn't use Stripe for payments as well. Because from the very beginning, that was my issue that I knew. I would not just have customers from. Well, back then when I found out Magic Pages, we still lived in Germany, but now I live in Austria. And it was clear from the beginning for me that probably Magic Pages, if we scale, will be an international business where we have customers now literally from New Zealand to the US, Peru and everything. And I don't want to handle Peruvian tax, if it is in that case.

So yeah, this is why we also with a merchant of records Paddle in this case. And it's a super interesting use case, I think. Now that Ghost also has one-time payments or donations included. Does PayGlue also work with those?

André: Yes. Of course, the most problem is what Stripe one-time payment says. You make a sort of donation button, but now you don't need Stripe for that to create a link. You can do it in Ghost natively and they call it donation five bucks and one link to pay. But maybe you start a new block. Yes. And you make a sort of founder membership. Pay what you want. Yes. Or one-time payment. And then the subscription comes later. It's very complicated to set up with Stripe. For example, when you take another payment provider like Lemon Squeezy or Creem or Paddle or Polar, you can set things like this up.

And then no matter what somebody uses one-time payment or pay what you want or subscription, you get access to your block because I'm the first founding member. I pay five bucks to support you and I don't need a subscription. But the problem behind this is the technical problem that. I have access to your exclusive articles as a founding member. And I'm not excluded because. I have no subscription. And things like that, you can't do with Stripe native. You can do it with Zapier and you can duct tape it with n8n of course when you're happy with that.

Jannis: That just opened a really interesting use case or thought that I had. I sometimes in the Magic Pages support chat get questions on how to use Ghost. Whether. I have tips on that both from Magic Pages customers and non-Magic Pages customers. And one that comes up, I would say every two to three months is a pay what you want subscription that they say, okay, my standard subscription is, I don't know, 10 bucks a month, but. I want to be able to offer people a pay what you want subscription. They can pay whatever they want maybe as a one-time thing, maybe as a monthly thing. And my answer so far has always been, yeah, I'm sorry, not possible with Ghost. Is that something that PayGlue would enable people to do? With Stripe in this case?

André: That is possible. Not with Stripe exactly. It's not natively possible because Stripe is a native integrated directly in the Ghost ecosystem as you know. But you can do it with another payment provider of your choice. And the most do pay what you want. But then it's a problem how to fix it in the background with Ghost. Yes, to grant access for your new memberships. Or you have a special birthday pay once and don't have a subscription anything what you want. That is possible. And of course it's possible when you already have Stripe in your blog and you use Stripe subscriptions and just want to add pay what you want or one-time payment without the donation.

Then you can use PayGlue in connection with your payment provider too. So you have more options to grant access for example when somebody pays five bucks for pay what you want in Gumroad or any other payment provider as you choose.

Jannis: Nice and does it work both as one-time pay as you want and also as a subscription?

André: Also as a subscription. That works in two ways. That's no problem because PayGlue is a sort of relay a sort of middleware. You connect inside of PayGlue your payment provider of choice and your blog and the computer talk via the API that is encrypted and the webhook is signed. So for example when I'm on your blog and you have one-time payment and you for example choose Paddle because you have Paddle in your magic pages already and I click buy. Then I get access granted to your blog and when you open your ghost blog and see my name my email address you have some labels and a note what. I have buy it when. I have buy it what was the order number and there are labels for example PayGlue active.

So our pay wall knows I'm an active user. And this works with Stripe when you already had Stripe set up or when you only have free membership here. The only thing that I really needed to detail it out in the documentation. Was that you don't switch to. Paid member in the blog article. So you always leave it blank for free member and then just put our HTML snippet code inside it for the PayGlue paywall.

Jannis: Essentially you're replacing the ghost paywall with the PayGlue paywall in this case then.

André: Exactly.

Jannis: Very nice. That's an interesting model because I'm currently in touch with another customer who might actually be listening to this and we've talked about this a couple of times now and I'm wondering if you had some thoughts on this whether that's possible with PayGlue and whether it would be easy for you to integrate that because then. I would need to integrate that. So maybe another use case for you. Have you thought about metered paywalls where customers say, okay, I want to grant membership XYZ 10 articles a month that they can read. Is this something that you have thought about before?

André: No, I don't have such a question that is very special in my feedback or in my closed beta or now we are an open beta but I will take it with me. I know with, for example, Paddle or Polar that is often used for SaaS businesses you can do metered products but of course you need this metered product 10 articles to be measured inside the paywall and the block and this is of course a sort of special need. I can put it in our backlog in our feedback and when enough customers interested in this of course you can put development in it and test it out if it works because. I have on all payment providers active accounts for testing and developing. And it's very special.

Jannis: I will send that customer your way to get in touch with you just so you can see whether your ideas on this match with his ideas because he is very keen on launching something like this still this year and I've said so far that could potentially be something that Magic Pages can offer but obviously we're not payment experts and it is not something that I can jump on immediately. So potentially if you're listening to this even if we haven't been in touch about this before get in touch with André and tell him that you want metered paywalls so his list gets longer and longer and things to include.

André: Yes and that is the very beautiful thing on the internet yes you have somebody who has a special problem and maybe we can solve it but at first we need to talk about it and then we will see.

Jannis: Yeah I think the reason. I mentioned it now is because of your explanation about the paywall that you replace ghost paywalls with your paywall because that is from the research I've done so far exactly what would be necessary for this so you're already a couple of steps ahead there so let's see what you two can come up with there.

André: The paywall was the mighty big frog in the whole development to get it right and of course we have a demo block blog.io.io and there you can test it yourself yes. I have connected this to our sandbox account so that you have a sandbox credit card and nothing pays directly from it and you can test yourself if your access is granted or not granted. I think this is the best way for somebody who's technically interested to test if a system works and he would pay for it or not and glue is not a payment provider often people ask hey are you a payment provider do you see my transaction and my credit card settings and everything else? No then you need to be a very certified and very security special company for this to do that and we are just a relay of course we need an email address and encrypted transaction that it's granted access for your ghost blog for new memberships but we don't see credit cards amounts or anything else what's very important for the step.

Jannis: Yeah it's also something that you've talked about a few times now is that trust and that security and if you remember when we first emailed about PayGlue that was one of the points that I raised that I personally am always a bit critical of adding an extra piece in a moving chain because in my eyes this is something that can break it's another thing that can go wrong and you had a really thoughtful answer to that can you quickly walk the listeners through how you earned that trust with PayGlue or what your thoughts are on how transparent you want to be to show that the middleware that you've built is something that people can trust.

André: Of course and I think the important thing is you don't have to trust me and you don't have to trust my infrastructure that is hosted in the European Union you can look in the code because PayGlue is open source of course not the things like support system like special needs in the dashboard like sign up but you can just go to our repo and fork it and test it yourself local on your mac for example or on your server directly and you can look into the code and check it yourself what we do and what we don't do so as you said what we see and what we don't see and I think that's the important part you don't have to trust me or my architecture in this point you can do it for yourself but when you say oh okay.

I saw it. I like it it worked for me and I don't need a server for my own on this. I don't need this or maybe my blog is already on ghost pro or example on your magic pages services then of course you can't do it with this and therefore you can use then PayGlue and you don't need any special code just HTML snippets to get it done and as you said for example when somebody buys something and it doesn't work for an unknown reason for example we have of course in the back end in the dashboard for you there you can see what happens whereas X is granted or if there may be a maintenance problem with a webhook and you need to restart the webhook something else because when a lot of machines talk together sometimes the machine may be delayed and you get an error and then it's important that the customer don't buy new you just click on retry webhook and X is granted so it should be very easy for you as an end user and your blog.

Jannis: On that note if something fails in that whole chain between the payment processor between PayGlue between ghost and in that entire chain if something does fail and before we started the recording you brought up a case where somebody bought something at 2am and then it failed what happens in that case now? Would they see an error on their side or would it just be a generic failure that they can't interpret?

André: That is exactly what I talked about in my setup before PayGlue. I had set up an n8n workflow on my own server and because I grew out of Zapier and I grew out of Make and had my own server and wanted to play something and learn a lot and there a webhook failed on 2am and the customer said oh I don't have access and so I cancelled my subscription so I lost a happy paying member and I don't get anything yeah I didn't get anything. I forget to set up an SMTP in n8n to inform me when something doesn't happen because when everything works fine and smooth and every button is green happy life but when something doesn't work you need to do something and in PayGlue of course you get an information email to the customer hey something didn't work please log in and review it and then you see in the analytics tab exactly what process failed for example order payment failed okay maybe the payment on the credit card failed there you have a charge back you need to handle this directly with the payment provider access granted or not or maybe the webhook had a problem because of a maintenance or of a delay and then you can see it you can see what's wrong and you can replay.

You don't want to go to your customer and say it didn't work you want to hit replay the customer get access granted get an email from your ghost blog hey welcome to our blog. The automation behind it should work and yeah because I had the problem that I didn't get any information because I didn't set up any SMTP information in my n8n setup lesson learned for me and I don't want that my PayGlue customers learn it the hard way and lose customers.

Jannis: Been there done that. I think every founder has to go through that at some point that something is failing and you don't even know about it that's happened a few times at magic pages as well.

André: Yeah the silent fails are the fails that are very critical often you don't see in everything every check mark is green but something doesn't work so therefore. I have a couple of steps inside PayGlue to inform the customer and if that doesn't work he can always set up a support ticket and I help out of course.

Jannis: Perfect now one question I also sometimes get with magic pages now a little bit less often than a year ago is the fact that. I have been doing magic pages on my own you're doing PayGlue on your own what if you disappear tomorrow would that connection still work or would there be an actual issue for the ghost publisher and that's it.

André: The nice thing on automations is when they are set up and they work after a test so they work permanently or if somebody changes something on some end and you need to do a little bit of code rework to make it done because a payment provider changed an endpoint or something else that might of course happen in the future but the system will still running and when it's failed you get a notification what failed and you can rework it but of course not when a payment provider changes an endpoint that needs to be done in the code.

Jannis: I think that's something that. Is sometimes a bit underestimated in that sense that even if you or me end up in a hospital for I don't know a surgery or something the things will probably just keep running. Even though we are founder-led businesses the systems the computers are in most cases hundreds of kilometers away from us anyway they don't need to be pet all the time they don't need to have their good night story they will in most cases just keep running and when something fails that's usually when you as an end customer and notice it. I know that I've spent three weeks on the road in Scandinavia this year and have scaled down my involvement in magic pages a lot and nobody noticed and I bet it would be quite similar with most founder-led businesses.

André: Yes and that's intended it should work and it should not only work when you stay on top on the server and pet it and it should work as intended and work flawlessly of course and therefore we're doing this of course now we don't have both time the whole life to sit in front of a Mac and watch the server what he's doing therefore there are some alarm systems when something doesn't work in the background or some provider changes something and as you said you did a great job when you were three weeks on a vacation and we filled your own battery and charged it up and nobody noticed when your system flawlessly works.

Jannis: Building it for three years that's all the lessons I learned put into that basically. I remember having a vacation in Sri Lanka two years ago which also had a time difference to you know all the server infrastructure. I had in Germany and in that case. I actually had to get active it was a case where the server couldn't reach the internet because the infrastructure provider had a massive network issue it was not Hetzner it was a smaller server provider that I'm not with for multiple reasons now but that was one of the last points where I was sitting at.

I think it was 2 a.m. In Sri Lanka in our hotel room on my laptop trying to figure out what's going on there trying somehow to call the emergency hardware support of that server provider from a you know Sri Lankan eSim card which didn't work and that was for me the moment where I said hey this isn't sustainable and since then magic pages has improved a lot and I think that every business has those stories similar to you you had an issue at 2 a.m. Where you didn't notice that something went wrong you built something around it and I think that's how lots of solo businesses develop and evolve over time.

André: You said reliability and I'll give you an example Claude Code 20 bucks subscription you can do a lot of nice shit nice websites a landing page duct tape it together and you have a sort of product yes and but my company lives in Germany your company lives in Austria and we have some laws and for example a simple subprocessor list yeah or a data processing agreement yeah to give it to your customers yeah. I often see software new SARS products microSARS that look in the front very shiny and nice and you look in and didn't see any support email address or a conduct form or a terms or a legal or something else yes ghosts publishing can be an own business with own credibility for your text for your business and everything else and when you are controlled in Germany or another EU you need a data processing agreement with a scribble on it yes so it's a PDF document but it it turned out.

I had a seven days around a week with special experts to make this document yes nobody will see it you only look in you want this document you can download it but these are the little things or do we have a subprocessor list does somebody ask me and I said yes. I have a list here but the list wasn't linked in the navigation my problem huh and I solved the problem the list was online and he could see and a lot of this shit yes then you can see from the outside if somebody does it mean. Really good or just duct tape something in front what is shiny so that there are little things that I'm looking for when I decide to work and to pay for a SARS or not to pay for a SARS.

Jannis: Yeah I think that's a really interesting filter to have for any tool and I know that the EU gets a lot of hate for GDPR and data privacy and cookie banners I've learned from the guest in the last episode from Mark who lives in Australia that he barely sees any cookie banners because he lives in Australia and doesn't have the same regulation and I know that the EU gets a lot of hate for implementing all of this but it created a really interesting filter to see which businesses which tools actually take it serious and say okay in some cases and some points the GDPR might be overshot but on the other hand if you see that somebody takes care of it and has a data processing agreement has a subprocessor list has an actual data privacy policy that goes more than hey we collect data because you know we want to do it then you actually know there's somebody behind that tool that cares somebody that cares about the data of their customers somebody that has thought about these things at least even if the outcome is you know that it's a very relaxed data privacy policy somebody has sat down and thought about it and I think that's a very interesting filter you brought up on how to filter out tools that you want to use in your business and not.

André: Yes because I own a business as you and I need a data processing agreement from another SaaS to work with it when I get controls of my company and that although a little bit of filter as you said and most people think oh I just put it in Claude or in ChatGPT and I get the real text and everything is fine but no that didn't work of course you can make a draft with it no problem. But yeah then you have to talk to experts and experts want money yeah you want money for your SaaS. I want money for my SaaS to make it sustainable and that is the interesting part a lot of people complained about why I don't have a free tier.

Jannis: Why don't you have a free tier.

André: We don't have a free tier because. I want to be sustainable and long in the business and the problem with free tier is you get easy 1000 users but 1000 users take a lot of resources from the server from the database and you have to pay it yes and that is not sustainable when you are not a big company with hundreds of thousands of dollars on your bank account I'm starting with this project and. I want to be sustainable and on a long-term run and the people who understand it say okay right I get it of course they have 30 days free testing you need of course to give it some time to test it out yes.

Jannis: I think it hasn't happened to Magic Pages that somebody wanted a free tier because we have the advantage that people know that hosting costs money that there are a few free hosting providers out there. I know that 20 years ago or so I've used free hosting providers in Germany which always had very fun communities with them but where we saw some resistance was also when we removed the starter tier on Magic Pages earlier this year where we also said something similar we said the starter tier was meant as a starter tier it was not meant as I'm going to run my blog in the starter tier forever because our assumption was it lets you start and once you see some success you will upgrade to the pro plan which has all the let's say the tools and less restrictions that you need as a ghost blog that wants to sustain itself as well and what we saw is that the starter tier grew and grew and grew and people never moved off it and that just became very unsustainable for us as well because on the flip side people on the starter tier.

Needed the most support which we happily give but there's also a point where you have to say hey if half of the support we have to give for the starter tier is just because of missing features that you would have on the pro tier then that's a signal for us that's a signal where we say. Clearly the starter tier didn't work as we intended it so we shut it down right now magic pages actually growing more than ever before now that we removed the starter tier and we see that people actually started upgrading from the starter tier to the pro tier but it was a scary moment for us as well to just remove a tier and.

I remember in February talking to Sviatoslav who just joined in February to work at magic pages and saying hey. I have no idea what's going to happen when we removed the starter tier but. I want to do this because I see that it's not sustainable for us it turned out well but as you said we are running businesses and I think we're happy to give support both you and me we're happy to support people and the goals that they have with our respective tools.

But we also know the charity where we can do that for free so I definitely understand why you don't have a free tier especially as something as critical as something that touches payments because if something goes wrong. I know that people on the free tier also want to have proper support and proper resolution to that and you can only do that if you know that you get something back in exchange as well.

André: Exactly and the pricing was the biggest issue. I normally thought okay. I set a pricing table what feels good what feels wrong what would I pay and you make a sort of founding tier next to it easy peasy I thought and then with the closed beta. I get a lot of feedback so to talk to your customers is a very important thing not only with feature requests and bugs and what feels good what fits right. I internally thought. I have two prices yes a sort of big agency price and a sort of studio pricing yes so you can have two publications and you have enough to do to work with the two prices and then the most people said yes it's nice but when I start with a block.

I only have one publication maybe one payment provider in your list that I like to use and I'm starting out and. I want to get some money and I go outside and write and write what do they do they don't pay such amount of money for it but the step to the pricing is too big to choose it because maybe they have no customer to pay their own bill so I step back. I thought what may be possible so I change the pricing table again in front end because of customer feedback. I already had and now. I have a sort of solo plan when we launch openly then when you have one publication you can do it very well with one publication because. I have more than one ghost blog.

I need another tier on this maybe you are a sort of social agency and you have 10 ghost blogs to work with it yes and that was the question too what do I do when. I have my ghost blogs what do I do when. I have a team somebody from the accountant somebody from the technical and somebody who only writes so I didn't think about it and so now we have some roles and members inside the dashboard who can handle your publications and your payment providers. I didn't thought about this before.

Jannis: Yeah also something we're working on right now because that's as you said you don't think about this before because you know you have one use case in mind when you develop your product and that usually comes from your own experiences because we both solved our own problems and as more and more people. Start using your product. You realize that the same problem. The same solution that you built can solve multiple problems and all of a sudden you need to think about well okay there might be a technical team member in a blog or in a publication that needs certain access there is somebody that does accounting for them that might not even be in the same company they might have hired a separate accounting agency for that how do you do that?

Because in our case we're using Ghost's own built-in billing portal which only gives access to the entire billing stuff to the owner of the blog post do you then give the accountant that is not even part of your company ownership of your blogs that doesn't make any sense so as you say you talk to your customers and you build this step by step to figure out a way that's smart for you and that's also smart for them in a sense that they can use it the way they intended.

André: Sustainability and long-term and the problem wasn't to make an admin role a technical role an edge role that's not the problem or a booking role the problem are security can somebody from bookkeeping close your account and when you change the account owner because your email address changed how do we do this? And that are some little things you think you do a little tweak and then you have three days of coding sessions. Testing, staging and deployment and then you say okay now you can change your role.

Jannis: There's a lot of work in the background that's even as somebody that has built a product for three and a half years now. I sometimes forget and I think oh that's such a small change then I sit there for a week and in the end I'm just annoyed with everything because there's so many little things involved that you simply forget sometimes.

André: And you get feedback for example a few people ask hey we use Mollie we want to use Mollie yes you have Mollie on your list it's a new provider okay I looked into Mollie and Mollie is special for e-commerce yes and it doesn't work quite well with web hooks and documentation and what we want to do with this and so I reconsidered it and said sorry actually we only have one customer who wanted to use Mollie they now use another payment provider of their choice but for one customer 14 days of development it doesn't work out in this system when a few customers want to take Mollie and use it then we can work it out of course so the problem is not to say yes the problem is to say to your feedback. What you get from the users or customers is to say no and why no. To understand it yes and that works quite well.

Jannis: All right so you are not going to do Mollie as a payment provider which payment providers do you actually support right now apart from I think you mentioned Stripe Paddle right now Lemon Squeezy.

André: We support Polar PayPal Paddle Gumroad Lemon Squeezy and Ko-fi Ko-fi is something from PayPal I think and we have Creem on it and Patreon and we have on the list for example for German users Digistore on Copecart and of course some special payment providers from the USA but they are still with an asterisk for planning and looking into it actually I'm focused on what works and what can be optimized and when somebody says hey you have something on their list when is it available we have an open roadmap we have an open changelog we're happy to talk to people when they are interested and often people ask hey Stripe yes of course.

Jannis: We work with Stripe so also if I use something like Ko-fi or Patreon that means even though let's say those users they didn't start the process on my ghost blog they might have come through you know social media whatever saw a Patreon link somewhere have a specific membership there they would then be able to get access to your ghost blog and you basically say here's an extra perk for that.

André: Exactly like in Patreon you have for example Discord yes and you grant Discord access to a server with a role and you do the same with your ghost publication and access and of course Patreon is an own ecosystem yes they want all your texts they want all your PDFs all your creative work and that doesn't quite fit with your blog that is externally but often people use it and I didn't know that before. I talked to my customer who had a Patreon and I found out a lot of people use it as workaround because it works quite well and they take the payments through Patreon and do the most stuff in their own blog okay no problem with that and when you buy in Patreon directly you get access granted and when you buy directly on a button on your blog yes you get access granted through Patreon because we have features not only connection to the ghost blog maybe that I forget to tell you can make a button or a pricing table and for example Ko-fi button or a pricing table with the three tiers from Patreon and then you can choose which product to map it because you need to map it and what happens next do somebody get an hey you're welcome or an opt-in email for your blog you can choose what you like and we recommend something and the most interesting part was in the first UI you need to manual copy paste your Patreon product ID into PayGlue to make it happen of course we reworked it now with every payment provider you have a sort of autofetch product when you make the connection we can autofetch the products and you can map this membership tier directly to this product from your payment provider like Patreon or Ko-fi or anything else.

Jannis: Interesting how it all comes together André it's been super lovely to talk to you about PayGlue about your journey with developing it you were kind enough to give a discount code for Magic Pages customers that can be found in the customer portal. So if any Magic Pages customer wants to have a look at PayGlue and try that out there is an exclusive deal section there where you can also have a little discount code for PayGlue on that note there's a question that I always ask everybody in the end André is there anything that I should have asked that I didn't anything we forgot to mention.

André: No I think we could have a long podcast episode. And because we are stepping from topic to another topic and normally long podcast forms. On the legal basis when you listen to legal podcasts because the topics they are quite special and I think our founding journeys that we talked about the problems and everything else it was very nice when there are some questions and people like to see me again to answer some questions they maybe not send me in my email inbox I'm happy to come back again and we should talk about then these topics at this time. I think we talked about everything.

Jannis: Well thank you so much for coming on André for spending some time with us and as I said if anybody out there has the need to have ghost memberships with another payment provider because maybe Stripe isn't available in your country or you just annoyed with Stripe for whatever reason then have a look at payglue.io and see what André has been up to there.

André: Thank you very much happy to be here and stay healthy.

Jannis: Yes stay healthy and have a good rest of your day everybody.

André: Goodbye bye.