Ghost's starter tier should include custom integrations
The "starter" tier($9 at the time of writing) for a Ghost hosting membership does not include custom integrations. This means you can't get API keys to manage customer and content information from remote applications. So, if I want to, for example, fetch a list of my active susbscribers inside an AWS lambda function, I have to upgrade to the "creator" tier and pay $25 a month. I do not want to do that. There is another alternative to Ghost's pricing model which is self hosting. Ghost is an open source project and the paid tiers more-or-less just offer convenient hosting and support for larger teams. So, in lieu of upgrading my subscription to $25 a month, I setup a self-hosted instance and started paying Digital Ocean $5 a month and canceled my Ghost subscription of $9 a month.
I think Ghost is missing an opportunity here. The Ghost customers on the starter tier that want access to API keys are also the same customers that have the experience to easily self-host a Ghost instance elsewhere. I think Ghost is trying to use custom integrations as a selling point to upgrade to the next tier, but in reality it's an incentive to abandon paying Ghost altogether and choosing self-hosting as an alternative.
Ghost, I like you. Let me pay you $9/month.