We started using Ghost when it was still in its very early stages.
Hosting Ghost was not always easy; upgrades would fail once in a while and it lacked many features. It was not perfect but it did allow hosting a blog without doing any coding.
Email subscriptions were introduced to Ghost as an experimental feature. We enabled them and our user base has been continuously growing until Ghost suddenly removed the feature. Membership was introduced to replace subscriptions. It was buggy and few themes supported it. In addition and even though we did not want to monetize this blog, membership did require us to open an account with Stripe.
We patiently waited for a year hoping that email subscriptions would come back but unfortunately Ghost doubled down on membership. It did make financial sense for Ghost but not for this blog so we have started search for a new platform.