Outpost

Publishing From and To The Future

Proudly Powering:

What We Do

Grow Your Audience 📈

Ghost and Outpost form a publishing system where members and newsletters are core features, built to turn casual visitors into subscribers.

Make You Money 💲

Outpost optimizes Ghost sites to build reader loyalty and convert your free readers to paid members automagically. And we do that without being a parasite that takes a % of your revenue.

Save You Time and Money ⏰ & 💰

We're a co-operative, not a VC-funded company. We don't charge 10%+ of your revenue; we charge reasonable flat fees. And we set you up with smart automations so you can spend more time creating, not doing businessy stuff.

How We Do It

The Best Damn Autoresponder for Ghost 🤖

You aren't just writing a newsletter. You are running a media business, and that means you have to communicate to readers who sign-up, who upgrade, who cancel, who get a gift subscription, and who are close to renewal. We automate that and more, so you can spend time writing.

Tip Jar and Donations 🏦

The Outpost Tip Jar makes it simple for people to support you with tips and donations by credit card, Apple Pay, Google Pay, and PayPal. It turns out that even your paying subscribers want a way to support you even more. Many Outpost publishers make more from just from donations than they pay us. And we don't take a penny of any of these donations.

Actually Useful Analytics & Reports 📡

Outpost provides a daily report into your inbox that lets you know in a glance how your site is performing and then lets you get back to work. We also integrate privacy-respecting website analytics from Plausible for deeper dives. And for Luna+ customers, you'll also get Contextly's daily, weekly and monthly reports, with insights into evergreen content and more.

Intelligent Internal Recommendations 🧠

For Luna+ customers, Outpost integrates Contextly's cloud-powered, all-internal content.recommendation system, which uses machine-learning powered recommendations to show your readers related, popular and evergreen content, in modules inside and at the end of articles. You get point-and-click control over the look and feel, as well as ways to exclude content or promote special events and offers. That means readers read more.

Intelligent Calls To Action 🪄

Luna+ customers get to use Outpost's Intelligent CTAs, which show different prompts to different levels of readers. New-to-you readers get asked to subscribe, registered free readers get prompted to move to a paid membership, while paid members get prompted to hit up the Tip Jar. Convert more readers without annoying your paid readers with irrelevant and off-putting prompts.

Gift Subscriptions 🎁

Luna+ subscribers can give their readers a simple way to give a gift subscription, and even set it to start at a later date such as a birthday. Outpost handles all the complications, including renewal communications. All you have to do is share the link.

Tech Integrations 🏗

Since Ghost is an open-source publishing system, Outpost can integrate the best outside tech services with your site, including paid member-only comments, privacy-friendly analytics, paid podcast services, and great internal content recommendations. We make them simple to configure so you spend time writing, not futzing.

Group Buying Power ✊

Outpost is a publishers cooperative, and we use our group buying power to get deep discounts on tech services for each of our members. For example, we integrate Plausible Analytics with your site and on our intro plan, all of our services together are cheaper than if you paid for Plausible yourself.

Help Moving and Ongoing Support 🚚 & 🆘

Changing publishing systems isn't fun, but we can help make it easy. From choosing a theme, walking you through content migration, and teaching you the new system. We got you. (Luna Plan+) We support you with all our features and the ones we integrate, and for those that want support with everything, we build custom support plans as well.

About Us

We admit it. We're different. First off, we're a publishers cooperative, meaning the goal of the organization is to provide services to publishers, not to make a billion dollars. We are not funded by venture capitalists. Our bylaws prevent us from selling out to Big Tech. And if we make more money in a year than we need to run the company, we give members a dividend, like REI or a local grocery store co-op.

We believe the future of publishing is people paying to support the publications and writers they care about, and that those publications should keep as much as possible, not make billionaires even more money.

Our founding team has been building ethical publishing software for over 10 years, and our CEO Ryan Singel was a writer and editor at Wired for ten years previous to that. We know publishing and we care about making publishing software better.

1. Do you host websites?

Generally speaking, no. The majority of our clients choose Ghost(Pro) to host their site and send newsletters (that's an affiliate link). If you are an enterprise client with very specific needs, we can host your site.

2. If I use Outpost, am I stuck with Outpost?

Absolutely not. We build our system so that you can leave anytime, with all your members, payment relationships, and as much data as we can provide.

3. If I join the co-op, do I have to go to meetings or do other members have a say in my site?

No. Outpost is a member-services cooperative, not a worker cooperative. That means our job is to provide services at a lower price to our members. But there are no meetings, and your site is still your site.

4. I have a complicated project and want to integrate newsletters with our main system/build a custom theme/do something mind-bending. Can you help?

Absolutely. For instance, we built a custom solution, built on Ghost, for The Atlantic, with 9 paid subscriber-only newsletters, all synced with The Atlantic's existing subscription system. Contact us at info@outpost.pub to talk about what you are looking to do.

Outpost Moved its Servers to the E.U.