ProofStack research · 2026-09-02
Two companies stream their revenue live: inside Ghost's $11.1M and Buffer's $24.5M public dashboards
Most companies' revenue figures are one-off interview snapshots that can never be re-checked. Two cases in this library are counter-examples: Ghost and Buffer hang their operating dashboards on the public internet. Every figure below can be verified in two minutes at ghost.org/about and buffer.com/transparency (fetched 2026-09-02).
Ghost: month-by-month ARR, plateau included
Current dashboard: ARR $11,099,649, MRR $924,970, 30,579 active customers, 2.92% net churn. Rarer still, the page exposes every monthly ARR value since August 2018. Year-end cuts:
- 2018: $1.22M · 2019: $1.86M · 2020: $2.92M · 2021: $4.19M
- 2022: $5.57M · 2023: $6.34M — flat at ~$6.3M from June through December, a full-year plateau
- 2024: $7.33M · 2025: $9.35M · July 2026: $11.02M (clear re-acceleration)
A company willing to leave its stagnant year on its own homepage is more persuasive than any growth narrative — because it makes the good news credible too.
Buffer: transparent down to the CEO's salary
The live dashboard shows MRR $2.0M, ARR $24.5M, 225,484 monthly active users, $28 ARPU, and a CEO salary of $310,320 — every employee's pay is listed. Public since 2013, the dashboard itself became an industry citation source: a zero-marginal-cost, permanent PR channel.
The mechanism: operating data as a content asset
What both share: they turned the numbers other companies leave to funding announcements into continuously updated pages on their own domain. Every citation — including the article you are reading — is a free acquisition event. This is not content marketing; it is making the company itself a citable primary source.
What not to copy
Transparency is a one-way door: once published, hard to retract, and a downturn plays out in public. Buffer captured a first-mover premium in 2013 that a follower cannot; Ghost survived its 2023 plateau because a non-profit constitution means no investor pressure — a funded company does not have that option.
Method
All figures come from direct fetches of the two public pages on 2026-09-02. No ranking or traffic figures appear here — we only state what anyone can reproduce for free.