I don’t want to run ads, I’m asking if Discourse places ads on forums? I saw a few ads on forums where Discourse was promoting its own products, but can’t tell how that looks once one has a forum up and running. i.e. is the Start plan forum ad-free?
I trialled the starter plan a while ago and there are no ads. 
What you see in the Plans and Features for the starter plan is what you get. Nothing more nothing less.
1 Like
cheers, that makes sense.
Yes, 100%
We host a few forums for free for various reasons, on those (with the consent of the admins) you might see some ads. Currently they are for Discourse hosting. You also see these ads here on Meta.
This is an experiment that Discourse is running, the ads are very very limited in scope and fully under our control. They are only shown to anonymous (non-logged in) users.
Another reason you might see ads is that admins can choose to show ads for their own communities benefit, using the Discourse Advertising Plugin (Ads)