Here are a few related discussions that people might be interested in:
- Free Hosted Option?
- Why is hosting so expensive?
- Hosting options (Discourse hosting vs. 3rd party hosting)
To recap the key points from this and the linked discussions, if you are looking at Discourse for your open source community, here are your best options:
- Host with the Discourse team. The lowest price point as of December 2015 ($100/month) is probably too much for most open source projects, unless your community is really large.
- If you have an open source community and can make the case for it, reach out to team@discourse.org to discuss the possibility of the Discourse team offering you free hosting. (ref)
- Self host via your host of choice. You’ll pay around $10/month for the hosting but you’ll have to manage the instance yourself.
- Get a plan on Communiteq (formerly DiscourseHosting). Their lowest price point as of December 2015 is $20/month, which probably makes sense for the average open source community which doesn’t see much general discussion traffic. (I say “general discussion” as opposed to discussion on specific issues, PRs, etc. which carries on well on places like GitHub).
I’ll probably go with option 4 since I’d rather spend the extra $10/month over self-hosting and save myself the time managing the install. My project is way too small to justify $100/month, though in theory I’d prefer to host with the “Mothership”, so to speak. And I doubt a small project like mine would be a good fit for option 2.