I am looking at starting a community with Discourse and using the standard plan (Discourse pricing | Discourse - Civilized Discussion). When purchasing hosting with Discourse, are you locked into an annual plan? Or can you just pay monthly and cancel anytime?
Many thanks
For the Basic/Standard/Business plans, you can cancel every month.
For Enterprise, it depends, since those often contain custom work and migrations.
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Just to add, if you pick the Business plan and want to use our free migration services then you would need to pay for a year of hosting upfront: 
From our Migrating to Discourse | Discourse - Civilized Discussion page:
How much does it cost?
On our Business hosting we cover three days of standard migration work with one year of hosting payment upfront. (If you qualify for a non-profit or education discount, the discounted pricing won’t take effect until after that first year is up.)
On our Enterprise hosting three days of custom migration work is covered, with three months of hosting paid upfront (or a commitment to a minimum of one year).
Three days is generally enough to migrate most communities. Extra time is only needed for extremely complex migrations or for communities with millions of users or topics/threads.
If more than three days is required, extra time is charged at our hourly rate of $250. If we can see the database ahead of time, we can estimate how much extra time might be required. If you accept our estimate, we will only charge for actual time worked.
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