Ghost shows a warning when one or more of your members has more than one active paid subscription at the same time.

A banner appears at the top of your members list when Ghost detects a member with two or more active paid subscriptions. Each one bills separately, so the member is being charged more than once for access to your publication.

Ghost's default signup flow prevents this automatically by asking for an email before sending someone to Stripe, so we can recognize an existing member.

Duplicates appear when a member reaches Stripe through a route that skips that step — usually a custom membership page in your theme, or a checkout button that links straight to Stripe. Stripe allows a customer to hold more than one subscription by default. So a member who reaches checkout this way can go through the payment flow and subscribe a second time — genuinely paying again — usually because they've forgotten they already subscribed.

Select the banner to filter your members list to the affected people, then decide how to handle each one. For most publishers that means cancelling the extra subscription — from the member's profile in Ghost or in your Stripe dashboard — and optionally refunding the overlap.

Yes, Stripe has an optional setting to limit customers to one subscription. When it's turned on, Stripe checks at checkout whether the customer already has an active subscription and, if they do, sends them to sign in to their account instead of paying again.

This setting lives in your Stripe dashboard and has to be turned on there — it can't be enabled from inside Ghost. Here's how to set it up:

1. In your Stripe dashboard, open the Checkout and Payment Links settings and find the Subscriptions section.
2. Turn on the option to limit customers to one subscription.
3. Choose redirect to your website and enter your Ghost sign-in link, which is your site address followed by #/portal/signin — for example, https://www.yoursite.com/#/portal/signin.
4. Save your changes.

Once this is on, any member who tries to subscribe again while they already have an active subscription is redirected to sign in to their existing account. Stripe matches them by email address, so this works across any custom membership pages or checkout buttons.