Why I built xVoid - Ghost CMS commerce without the 10% take-rate
I was paying roughly £7,800 a year in platform fees on £6,500/month of sales. So I built the cart I wished existed: $15/month, no take-rate, native to Ghost.
I ran a Ghost site for a year before I built xVoid. My readers wanted stickers, prints, a member library, the usual creator stuff. Ghost handles memberships brilliantly. Everything else, you bolt on.
The bolt-ons all cost money. Real money.
The take-rate problem
Pull up Substack. Say you make $5,000 a month from paid subscribers. Substack takes 10% of that off the top. Then Stripe takes another 3% or so. By the time the money lands in your account, you're missing roughly $650 a month. That's $7,800 a year. For what, exactly? Hosting your text and processing a card.
Gumroad isn't kinder. Direct sales (someone clicks your link) are 10% plus 50 cents per transaction. If a buyer arrives through Gumroad's "Discover" marketplace, that becomes 30%. You're paying for the privilege of having Gumroad show your product to a stranger.
Shopify starts at $39 a month for the entry plan. Add the apps you actually need (digital downloads, reviews, a half-decent theme), and you're at $80 to $100 a month before you've sold a thing.
Now think about a Ghost publisher selling £10 stickers. On Gumroad, after fees, that's roughly £8.20 in your account. On Substack with paid memberships, you'd lose £1 of every £10 you collect. Forever. No matter how big you got.
The numbers add up. Mine added up to about £180 a month I was lighting on fire.
What Ghost actually offers
Ghost is honest about what it does. It's a publishing platform. The official ecommerce documentation tells you to embed a Gumroad button or use Snipcart. There is no native cart, no product pages, no inventory, no shipping rules. Just memberships and a Stripe key.
That is fine for some people. If you sell one digital ebook and call it done, the embedded Gumroad button works. The trouble starts when you want any of the things actual shops have: variants, weight-based shipping, tax that respects the UK's inclusive-pricing rule, a real product page that doesn't break your theme, an order with a tracking number a customer can use.
I tried five different stacks before I gave up on patching it together. Snipcart for the cart. A separate plugin for inventory. Stripe Tax (which the small embeds didn't support). A Google Sheet for orders, because the embed didn't store them. Email templates I copy-pasted by hand, because no system tied any of it together.
It worked, badly. Then I rebuilt it.
What xVoid is
A flat $15 a month. No percentage. No tier upgrades. No "platform fee, plus extra for shipping zones, plus $19 for the digital downloads add-on". One subscription. Everything in.
You connect your own Stripe account through Stripe Connect. The money lands in your account. We never touch it. We don't know your balance and we never will.
The product pages auto-publish to your Ghost site through the Admin API. They look like Ghost pages, because they are Ghost pages. The shop embed loads with one script tag. Customers check out at pay.yourdomain.com, on your own SSL, with your branding. They never see ours.
Everything else (shipping zones by country, weight bands, tax rules per region, discount codes, product reviews from verified buyers, digital downloads with expiring tokens, email notifications, print-on-demand through Printful, a content library gated by Ghost membership tier) is in the same $15. Not as add-ons. As features.
The math, again
If you sell £1,000 a month: Substack takes £100. Gumroad takes £100 plus the per-transaction fees. xVoid takes £12. The other £88 to £100 is yours.
If you sell £10,000 a month: Substack takes £1,000. Gumroad takes about £1,000. xVoid still takes £12. The gap gets wider as you grow, because their fee scales with your success and ours doesn't.
This is the thing that bugs me about percentage-based platforms. They charge you more every month for doing better. Why? Their costs don't scale with your revenue. A row in a database doesn't care if you sold one item or a thousand.
Why now
There's a specific kind of Ghost publisher who has been waiting for this. You write something good. People pay to read it. They also want to give you more money. A book you haven't published yet. A sticker. A signed print. A members-only video archive.
You can do all that on Substack and lose 10% of every pound, forever. You can do it on Shopify and pay $39 plus apps and run two separate sites. You can patch it together with embeds and a spreadsheet, the way I did.
Or you can pay $15, keep your audience on Ghost where they already trust you, and stop paying for things that don't scale with you.
That's the pitch. It's not exciting. It's just maths.
Start a 7-day free trial and see whether the maths works for you. No credit card up front. Cancel anytime.