Ghost Offers Are Not One Discount: Map Which Member Sees Which Offer Before You Switch Them On

A Ghost offer is a family of tools, not one discount

Ghost’s help page says the offers system lets you convert more paid customers with shareable discounts and with free trials on premium tiers, and that the offers area sits under Settings, Growth, Offers once a Stripe connection is active. It also describes retention offers, which are meant to reduce churn. Those are three different mechanisms with different audiences.

This article offers a short check to run before you promote an offer link: discount, trial, retention and record. It is editorial synthesis built from two Ghost help pages, not a Ghost feature. Both pages are undated in their body text, so everything here is what they say at the time of writing, and Ghost can change them.

Discounts: decide who gets them and for how long

The offers page says a discount offer can be created for any tier, as a percentage or a dollar amount, and applied once, over multiple months or forever. Each offer has its own name, description, coupon and custom URL.

The page lists ways to share an offer: a link in a newsletter to your free audience or a segment of it, a mention in a podcast episode, a link on social media, a link on your homepage for a limited time, or a custom offer for a partner with a code using their first name. It says visitors who click an offer link land on your site with the offer shown in Portal.

The choice that matters is duration. A discount that applies forever and one that applies once are different promises to the same reader, so write down which you chose and why before the link goes anywhere. The page does not say how many offers you can run at once or how they interact beyond the retention exclusions covered below.

Trials: three paths with different rules

The free trials page says there are three native ways to offer a trial. The first is a trial on a paid tier, which applies to all new signups on that tier. The second is a trial created as an offer and shared through a custom link with a specific group. The third is an uncarded trial using a complimentary plan.

For the first two, the page says members enter their card details when they sign up, are charged when the trial ends, and are not charged if they cancel before then. The offers page adds that a member who cancels a trial before it expires becomes a free member, and that a trial offer has a set duration, with 7 days the most common. For carded trials the free trials page calls it best practice to set up reminder messaging in Stripe so members know when a trial is ending.

For the third path, the page says a complimentary plan can run for 1 week, 1 month, 6 months, 1 year or forever, that members can upgrade to a paid subscription at any time through Portal, and that paid access simply ends after the duration if they do not. It also says members on a trial are not counted in the Monthly Recurring Revenue shown on your dashboard until they have made a payment at the end of the trial, which matters if you read that number as a measure of how the offer is doing.

The earlier article on Discord Server Subscriptions covered a similar point on another platform: a trial that ends with an automatic charge is a commitment you describe up front, not a giveaway.

Retention offers: read the exclusions before you rely on them

The offers page says that once retention offers are activated, a paid member who goes to cancel is shown a special offer before they confirm. The offer can be a set number of free months or a percentage off upcoming payments. It describes retention offers as cadence-based, applying to all tiers according to the member’s billing frequency. I read that as set per billing frequency rather than per tier; confirm it in your own Admin.

The page lists when a retention offer is not shown: when the member is currently on a trial offer, when the member is already using an active offer such as a signup offer, and when the member has previously redeemed a retention offer. In other words, a member who joined through your discount link may not see a retention offer, and a member who has used one once will not see a second.

One question stays open in the pages I read. The retention exclusion names a trial offer, while the free trials page separates a trial on a paid tier from a trial created as an offer. Neither page says whether a tier-level trial counts for the exclusion. Test it rather than assume.

A hypothetical walkthrough

Imagine an independent writer with one paid tier. They put a 7-day trial on the tier, create a separate discount offer to share with a partner, and switch on retention offers. For illustration only, three members arrive: one who signs up through the tier trial, one who signs up through the partner link, and one who signs up at full price.

Going by the pages, the full-price member is the clearest case for a retention offer when they try to cancel. The partner-link member is using a signup offer, so the exclusion for an active offer may apply. The tier-trial member may or may not be excluded, depending on how Ghost treats a tier trial, which is the open question above. The writer cannot answer these from the pages alone, so the writer tests each path with their own accounts before sharing anything.

Test it yourself and keep a short record

Before you promote an offer, sign up through each path with a test account if your setup allows it, try to cancel, and note what you see. Ghost’s page says you can see how many times an offer has been redeemed from the offers page or the archive page, and that archiving an offer makes it unavailable and can be reversed, so archive an offer you no longer want people to find rather than leaving the link live.

Decide what you are promising before you set a price. If you plan your content with a creator tool such as Launchvibes, add the offers you plan to run, who each should reach and what you will test to the idea. A promise you can describe in a sentence is easier to keep.

Keep a short record: the offers you switched on, the audience each is for, what you saw when you tested them, and the date you read the two pages. The earlier article on Kit’s creator network recommendations makes a similar case for checking a platform’s rules before you build on them.

Check Ghost’s current pages and your own settings before you charge anyone. This article reflects two Ghost help pages at the time of writing. It does not cover Stripe’s own terms, Ghost’s other help pages or fees, and it does not replace advice about your situation.