Labels on a PayGlue member
The four labels and the note PayGlue writes on a Ghost member, the fifth one that marks a test purchase, what each means, and how to use them for support and filtering.
Open a member in Ghost Admin that came through PayGlue and you get four labels and a note. Between them they answer nearly every support question about a paying reader without opening a provider dashboard.
The four labels
source:payglue
product:pricing-tier-2
payglue-active
payglue-provider:polarLabel | Means | Changes |
|---|---|---|
| PayGlue created this member | never |
| what they bought, one per product | added on a purchase, see several products |
| they have access right now | flips to |
| who took the money | never removed |
payglue-active is the one that matters most: it is what the paywall looks for, and it comes off the moment a subscription ends.
Note: Status and provider are two separate labels on purpose. Packing both into one string forces every reader of that data to do prefix matching, which is how an access check ends up comparing a provider name against a product id.
The test label
A fifth label appears on one kind of member only:
payglue-testIt marks a purchase the provider ran in its sandbox or test mode: a Polar sandbox checkout, a Creem test-mode product, a Dodo Payments test-mode purchase, a Lemon Squeezy test-mode order, a Gumroad test sale, or any purchase through a Paddle or PayPal connection set to sandbox. Such a member gets everything a real one gets, access, newsletter and emails as the rule says, so you can see the whole flow. The label and the line "Test purchase" in the note are what tell it apart afterwards.
The label comes from the provider's own flag, not from the address. A real reader with a throwaway address is a real member and never carries it. What happens to test members afterwards is up to you: see Test members.
When a membership ends
payglue-active is replaced by payglue-ended. The provider label stays.
source:payglue
product:pricing-tier-2
payglue-ended
payglue-provider:polarThe status flips rather than disappearing, and that is the point. A member with no status label at all is ambiguous: it could be somebody who cancelled, somebody whose purchase never granted anything because no rule matched, or somebody who was never a customer. With payglue-ended present, the first case is a fact you can read.
Warning: A member with
source:paygluebut no status label is worth a look. It usually means a purchase arrived and found no rule to apply, which is a failure that leaves no other trace. See Member did not receive access.
A member with several products
A reader can buy more than one thing: a membership first, an ebook or a ticket later. Ghost has only one kind of access per member, so PayGlue keeps the products apart through their labels. While a member is active, their product: labels are exactly the products that carry their access.
source:payglue
product:membership
product:ebook
payglue-active
payglue-provider:creemWhen one of them ends, PayGlue checks the others first:
- Another product is still active. Only that product's label comes off.
payglue-active, comped and the Complimentary subscription stay, and the note gains a line such asEnded product:membership: 2026-11-20. - It was the last one. The member ends as described above:
payglue-ended, comped off, and the last product label stays as a record of what they had.
A new purchase after an ending starts fresh. The old product labels go, because they describe purchases that are over.
Note: Labels you add to a member yourself stay where they are. PayGlue adds and removes only its own labels.
Note: Every product with a rule gives access to the whole publication. Ghost has no access per product, so a rule for an ebook opens your paid posts just like a rule for a membership.
The note
Direct via PayGlue | Provider: polar
Product: e910af3d-e1d7-450b-8596-2b17a309eab7
Order: 2026-08-14 | Event: 5e38bc88-0ff7-4b56-a379-78f058f853a6
Ended: 2026-08-14 | Event: c583ab77-e7d3-4b77-b33c-b63ba22c28b7Which provider, the provider's own product id, when they bought and which event said so, and when it ended and which event said that.
The product line carries the provider's id rather than your access key, because that is the string you paste into the provider's search box.
The note is a summary of the current state, not a history. Each purchase rewrites it, and the ending line goes with it, so a member who bought, left and bought again shows the second purchase only. For the full sequence, use Analytics > Webhook Events.
The comped flag is not a label
On sites with Stripe connected, PayGlue also sets Ghost's comped flag. It does not appear in the labels or the note.
That flag is what makes Ghost treat the member as paid, so native gating, tiers and the portal behave normally. Without a Stripe connection there is nothing for Ghost to hang it on, so the flag stays off and the paywall script does the gating instead.
See Zero-amount Stripe subscriptions for what that flag creates on the Stripe side.
This is what a member looks like after a cancellation on a site with Stripe connected: the status label is payglue-ended, the note has gained its ending line, and the zero-amount subscription Ghost created for the comped flag is canceled.
Removing access by hand
A cancellation reported by the provider does all of this for you: PayGlue swaps the status label, switches comped off and cancels the zero-amount subscription in Ghost. The steps below are for the case where you want to end access without a cancellation at the provider.
1. Remove payglue-active
Open the member in Ghost Admin and delete the label.
2. Cancel the complimentary subscription
Only on a site with Stripe connected, and only if the member shows as comped. Open the member's subscription in Ghost Admin and cancel it; Ghost sets the member back to free. Switching the comped toggle alone does not end it. Doing both steps is safe on either kind of site.
Leave source:payglue and the provider label alone. They record where the person came from, and removing them makes a later question unanswerable for no benefit.
Note: A manual change is not permanent. The next purchase or cancellation for that person writes the full label set again, so treat hand edits as a correction for one case rather than a configuration.
Using labels for real work
Filtering. Ghost lets you filter members by label. payglue-provider:kofi gives you everybody who came through Ko-fi, which is how you find the affected group when one provider has a problem.
Support. Somebody asks why they cannot read a post: the status label says whether they should have access, the provider label says where to look next.
Reconciling. Comparing active subscribers at the provider against members carrying payglue-active is a rough but fast check that the two are still in step.
See also: When a membership ends.
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