Alma (monalma.com): a bespoke video course website, built on Ghost and Paddle

Client

Alma — a financial education platform founded by Anaïs Simon, a former private banker now working independently. Its line: "Understand and give shape to your wealth."

Industry

Financial education and wealth planning — video courses sold online

Services provided

Managed Ghost CMS hosting
Bespoke Ghost theme built from the client's own brand book
Protected video course integration
International payments with Paddle (Merchant of Record)
Legal pages, refund policy, right of withdrawal
Client training and support

Project objective

Anaïs Simon wanted to sell a series of video courses on wealth management online, without depending on a proprietary course platform. Three requirements were set from the start:

The brand comes first. Anaïs arrived with a complete brand book produced by her design studio. The site had to execute it faithfully, not approximate it.
The videos had to stay protected. A paid course whose video any visitor can lift is worth nothing.
Sell internationally without building a tax department. Selling a digital product to buyers across several countries means a different VAT regime to apply, collect and declare in each one.

The challenge

Translating a brand book designed for print and moodboards — with its licensed typefaces and mineral textures — into a Ghost theme
Locking down access to the content and to the video itself, without forcing a second login on the buyer
Carrying the tax burden of international digital sales so the client never has to handle it
Leaving Anaïs completely self-sufficient on writing, without ever touching code

Solutions implemented

Managed Ghost CMS as the foundation

Ghost serves as both the editorial back office and the customer account system. Students sign in with their email address, with no password. Paid content is protected by Ghost's native tiers: one course = one tier, with content visibility set to that tier. The lock is applied server-side by Ghost — there is no paid content sitting in the page hidden by CSS.

We host and maintain the instance, the backups and the domain.

A bespoke theme, executed from the client's brand book

This is what sets the project apart from most of our work: the design didn't come from us. Anaïs arrived with a complete brand book, and our job was to execute it to the pixel rather than propose an art direction of our own.

So the theme follows it to the letter:

a strictly monochrome palette — charcoal, silver, mist, ivory — with no accent colour at all;
the brand's official typefaces, including a self-hosted serif for headings set in widely tracked capitals, and a libre sans-serif for body copy;
the mineral textures (limestone, grey marble, ivory marble) as section backgrounds;
a centred reading column, justified text with hyphenation, and plenty of breathing room.

One compliance detail that mattered: two of the brand's colours are surface colours, not text colours — using them as text on ivory fails WCAG AA contrast. We introduced a lightened charcoal for secondary text rather than shipping a site that looked good and read badly.

Protected video courses

The videos don't sit on a public platform. They live in a dedicated streaming library, behind two locks:

token authentication — every playback requires a valid, time-limited signature;
an allowed-referrer list — the player only starts if the calling page really is Anaïs's site.

The result: even if someone extracts the video URL from the page, it won't play anywhere else. And because the settings are applied at library level, any video added later is protected by default — there's no checkbox anyone can forget to tick.

International payments with Paddle as Merchant of Record

This is the structural decision of the project. Paddle isn't simply a payment processor: Paddle is the seller of record. Paddle invoices the buyer, applies the correct VAT rate for their country, collects it, files it, and then pays Anaïs. An independent creator therefore doesn't have to register for VAT in every jurisdiction she sells into.

What that meant in practice, and what we put in place:

prices displayed inclusive of tax: the buyer sees the amount they will actually pay, not a figure that inflates at checkout;
the 14-day right of withdrawal presented and accepted BEFORE entering the checkout, not during it — Paddle doesn't allow a custom checkbox inside its own flow, so the mechanism was built upstream, on the site side;
a dedicated refund policy page, linked from the footer, as Paddle's compliance review requires.

On the technical side, a companion service we host receives Paddle's notifications. When a purchase is confirmed, it grants access to the matching course in Ghost; on a refund, it removes it. The client has nothing to do by hand.

A step-by-step approach

1️⃣ A beta version on a subdomain — the design, the course path and the checkout flow were built and signed off away from production.

2️⃣ Brand integration — self-hosted fonts, textures, grid and components, with contrast checks throughout.

3️⃣ Editorial structure — the course path is a collection of five steps, each one a full article in its own right.

4️⃣ The video chain and the payment chain — a secured library on one side, Paddle and the companion service on the other, tested end to end.

5️⃣ Going live on the final domain, with the legal pages and refund policy in place.

What the client runs herself

Anaïs writes everything from the Ghost editor. There is one convention to remember: inside a step article, the divider line splits the text in two — what sits above it serves as the summary on the course-path page, what sits below becomes the detailed step page. That's an editor's gesture, not a technical one, and forgetting it breaks nothing.

She adds her copy, swaps her images and publishes without needing us.

Conclusion

This project shows what a well-supported Ghost can do outside its usual territory: a video course business, faithful to a brand book supplied by a third party, with content and video genuinely locked down and international tax carried by a Merchant of Record.

No proprietary course platform in the equation, no course-marketplace commission skimmed off the top, and a client who keeps control of her brand and her content alike.

Selling courses, video or premium content?

Let's talk — we build this kind of platform on Ghost, around your brand guidelines and your tax constraints.