Institutional Access
Libraries want to buy your work. Let them.
Universities, libraries, and big organisations are used to paying for content their whole community can read. Ghost has no way to sell them that — so this tool adds one. No thousands of accounts, no personal data to look after, no spreadsheet of logins.
The problem
Institutions don't buy the way individuals do.
A library that wants to give ten thousand students access to your reporting is not going to hand you ten thousand email addresses, and you would not want them if they did. They buy a site licence, they route their people through their own proxy, and they expect it to just work — which is exactly the shape of purchase Ghost's membership system has no answer for.
So most publishers say no to that money, or build something bespoke. Institutional Access is the third option: the institution's readers arrive already authenticated by their network, you invoice the institution once a year, and nobody has to create an account or surrender a single piece of personal data.
How it works
Their network is the login.
You get a second door
A subdomain of your own site — something like access.yoursite.com — becomes the entrance institutions use. Your main site is untouched.
You add their IP ranges
Each customer gets their address ranges recorded in the dashboard. On campus or through their proxy from anywhere, their readers land inside the paywall.
You send an invoice
Billing stays between you and the institution, the way they already expect to buy. Per-customer usage reporting tells you what the licence is worth at renewal time.
Setting up a new site takes a day or three, mostly DNS and testing, and I do that part with you. There's a full write-up on the blog covering the details.
What it can do
Revenue most Ghost sites leave on the table.
No accounts to create
Ten thousand readers, zero signups. Nobody at the institution has to make an account, and nobody at your end has to manage one.
No personal data to look after
You never receive their students' details, so you're never responsible for them. That's a feature for you and a requirement for a lot of them.
Works with the proxy they already have
Libraries have spent years setting up remote access. Your content slots into it rather than asking them to do anything new.
Usage reporting per customer
Know which institutions are actually reading you — the number you want in hand when the renewal conversation starts.
Your paywall, unchanged
Individual members carry on exactly as before. It runs alongside your normal memberships, not instead of them.
You keep the relationship
You set the price, you send the invoice, you own the customer. No marketplace sitting in the middle taking a cut.
A few things behave differently behind the institutional door — newsletter signups and commenting, mainly. The blog post spells out which.
Pricing
Comes with Core.
Institutional Access is included on the Core plan, along with the rest of the toolbox on simple, fair pricing. Setting up your subdomain is a short conversation — start it here.
Get started