From the very early days of Discourse, our mission has always been to empower communities of all sizes and budgets. Today, we are making it even easier to get started with Discourse the brand new Free plan!
Getting started
We will outline the details on our website soon, but you can set up a Free site right now using this link → https://id.discourse.com/create-site
You’ll be prompted to create a Discourse ID account or login if you have one, and then enter a your site’s name and chosen domain. That’s it, your new free Discourse instance will be ready in under 2 minutes!
Same usage limits as our Starter plan, except that you can have:
Up to 10 categories
No custom groups or private categories
No tags
No digest emails or default notification levels
Support via public topics on Meta only
The Free tier also includes a Discourse Hosted LLM, pre-configured & ready to use. Designed to save you time and effort, so that you can focus on what matters most; your community
How can you help?
As an early adopter of our Free plan, we would love to hear about any feedback, questions or problems that you run into as a reply to this topic.
For general support with Free sites, please post on Support.
Pro tip: When posting for support, be sure to mention that your site is on our Free hosted tier. This will help our Community tailor the advice they give to fit your experience.
And please mention that the question is about a site on the free plan. The fact that your access to features is limited might be relevant for those who try to help you.
Could there be a tag like #free-plan or something similar for related topics in support? Otherwise, it may get confused with https://free.discourse.group.
This is great news for lots of people, Nice work !
However, I’m wondering the rationale behind the thinking as to why would a free community not need:
I know that since the self hosting process has been simplified recently and people could just opt for that using a cheap server on Hetzner for example if they wanted the full Discourse feature set.
So its free until you hit the limits then one must either upgrade to a hosted plan or seek their own hosting? So essentially its a ‘as long as you make it before hitting limits’ free evaluation of Discourse?
But again, if this happens, anyone can restore a backup on their own cheap vps.
All of our plans have limits – Starter, Pro, and Business included.
In all cases, you could say the same thing. Once you hit the limits, you have a choice among:
(a) Live within the limits
(b) Upgrade
(c) Migrate (to self hosting, another provider, or another platform)
All three options are valid.
In practice, we do see people live within their limits indefinitely on many plans, while others getting more value out of the product choose to upgrade.
But ideally, we’re defining the plans well enough such that we’re allowing people with limited means to live within their means, and providing sufficient value to people with greater means to upgrade.
The limits for the Free plan were chosen with the same rationale in mind.
Pro tip: When posting for support, be sure to mention that your site is on our Free hosted tier. This will help our Community tailor the advice they give to fit your experience.
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