Hi there, I was wondering is it possible to set up and run a Discourse community for small scale use completely free of charge or are there neccesary costs at some stages?

Ultimately no, if you ignore sign-on bonuses. tbh the higher cost by far is the time you will happily forego proper work and sink into it instead :wink: If you are successful you might be able to cover costs by member contribution and/or affiliate marketing.

Discourse is an open source software and is free to use. In a self installation you will pay only the cost of the server that hosts the site, for example Digital Ocean has plans that start from $5/mo. Take a look to Recommended Hosting Providers for Self Hosters

Is there any way of fairly simply running a server for free. It’ll be fairly low traffic?

Nothing is free, and software needs to run on something. $5 a month for a small Digital Ocean droplet is a pretty great steal. I run mine on a DO droplet and have zero issues. My monthly cost with image upload space is $15 a month.

…and Digital Ocean isn’t even the lowest-cost VPS out there. I use Contabo (whose lowest-cost tier is about the same as DO, but gives you quite a bit more in terms of CPU/RAM/storage), but these hosts seem to offer a basic VPS for $30/year or less: https://crowncloud.net/clients/cart.php?a=add&pid…

Thanks for all the responses. Much appreciated.

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dax (Daniela) 08.Январь.2020 16:56:19 2

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