A few weeks ago when I first checked the Pricing page, plans on the pricing page ranged from Free to Enterprise, each pretty equal. A week later free was de-emphasized, with Starter through Enterprise highlighted. Earlier this week it was down to Pro through Enterprise. The grid is still there, but the Starter plan is otherwise gone and the Free plan is barely visible.
I also created a community a week ago or so to try Discourse out with the email features. I successfully enabled “Email in” and received emails. I went back today and that’s now flagged as “Upgrade to unlock”. I’m pretty sure I previously had choices for category types, and now 2/3 of them are now also marked as requiring an upgrade. Looking at the pricing page, I don’t see anything obvious about email support or category types being a premium feature.
Are these indeed recent changes? What should I expect pricing to look like in a year? I’d hate to set up a new community and then discover that the pricing has changed and we can no longer afford it. Are these features actually being removed from the free plan? Is there anywhere I can see an overview of what features are in what plan? Was this announced anywhere? (I don’t obviously see a blog post, meta thread, What’s New? entry, or code change corresponding to these changes, which is disconcerting.)
At least the changes to the pricing page sound (unsurprisingly) intentional, though I’m not sure what to expect longer-term: No starter upgrade option - #8 by Crown1
The Free plan is very new—we soft launched it less than 3 months ago and we are still ironing out a lot of things prior to public launch. In order to minimise confusion while we do that, we deprioritised it on the pricing page. Starter is still an active plan.
We allow only essential transactional emails (account activation and password resets) on the free plan, but due to an oversight, the email in functionality wasn’t disabled. We noticed that recently and reverted.
As far as I’m aware there has been no change to the category limits. The limit is 10 public categories and no private ones. The change you are seeing is just how we are communicating upgrade paths in the UI. We have to make money somehow or there won’t be anything to offer you for free.
We can’t guarantee anything long term, I’m afraid! But I can promise you that we believe deeply in the value of community and we understand how much trust customers put in us when they build valuable collective knowledge on our platform. Worst case scenario and we decide we can’t continue offering a free plan on our hosting, you will always be able to take your data and self-host. No one will ever be beholden to us.
As far as I’m aware there has been no change to the category limits. The limit is 10 public categories and no private ones.
I’m not seeing a limit on number, but on type.
When I go to create a new category, I can choose between:
Discussion A standard category with all the essentials for conversation.
Support Where members can ask questions and mark replies as solutions.
Ideas Where members can submit ideas and vote on the ones they want most.
A couple weeks ago, I’m pretty sure all three were available on a free plan, but today the second requires Pro and the third Business.
We allow only essential transactional emails (account activation and password resets) on the free plan, but due to an oversight, the email in functionality wasn’t disabled. We noticed that recently and reverted.
Good to know this was an intentional change. I’m not sure if I’m weird, but this strikes me as a key feature, so I’m confused it doesn’t have a row on the feature matrix. Could one be added? (The category types also seems to be missing, but I’m less clear on the importance of them.)
