Most things worth having cost money.
It takes work to earn the money you will need to pay for the things worth having.
So be it, work can be fun!
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A wife 
I understand it, ads could be the solution of nulling or profiting those costs on discourse side.
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Monetizing your discourse is a good idea, but it’s not that easy and is work 
My Amazon affiliate income is really bad! 
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Atleast you have income 
(through Amazon affiliate)
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You might want to take a look at Flarum - it’s a Discourse alternative which can be hosted, by them, for free. While it doesn’t have all the bells and whistles Discourse offers, it’s a great starting point for your community through which you can gain monetization funds to start your Discourse community.
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Many domain names are not at all expensive, some less than a dollar. You can run a search for a name at namecheap.com to see options, yearly registration fees are often much less than the cost of a server for discourse.
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Unless you want everyone to bookmark an IP address you’ll have to have a domain of some sort. If you’re still going to host it on your home internet you could use dynamic DNS. In all scenarios you’ll set the forum to private and tell search engines to not index your community.
All that said, the financial cost of running a community is the smallest one. I’m not sure if discourse (or any self-hosted) platform is going to be optimal for you. Discord offers categories by way of channels, maybe that could work? No cost (at the outset), no email servers and no devops.
I will definitely give it a try 
I don’t know how much I can monetize with just limited users seeing those ads, but still if I earn good, I would invest that money for discourse and port my forum onto discourse. And again run ads
I don’t really have a need for domain, I know about namecheap already, instead I was a long time freenom user before the meta lawsuit, I used their ml or gk domains which were totally free… It did not work on google sites or wix, but 000webhost and hostinger were just fine with it.
I am making a private forum for just freind chats, hence the reason I want to spend as less as possible.
Nice idea I don’t need a domain.
I do use discord, it’s just that nobody in my friend circle is ok with discords policy or terms of service. I have multiple times made servers and invited them, they just don’t accept it, the main reason why I thought to see if I can do anything with discourse.
The defaulting to ban user litigation has made it even worst.
Honestly, in this case, if you don’t want to buy - even Discord may be enough for you.
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I’m working towards a forum (almost done), and honestly the only thing that was paid was my Pi. Brevo’s free, Discourse’s free (woo hoo!), and some Pis don’t even come too expensive. Overall, the cost won’t be too great, and I’m planning my forum to be just a hobby thing or amongst my friends.
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As I said earlier not being able to make the users join the server in discord is the main reason I am here, nobody is ready to join discord. Due to discords shady practices. That’s why the first thing I thought about was a forum.
Otherwise this topic wouldn’t have been made in the first place.
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You could use the Subscription Plugin and charge all of your members a peppercorn rent that you can then use to fund the site costs.
The big platforms have to make money too, but do so in ways that don’t usually resort to charging for access.
I’m afraid you have to face the fact that in life, services are rarely completely free, there is always a catch.
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Thanks, I don’t need a pi (I guess, because I have a spare pc, correct me if wrong).
I do see Brevo is good enough for my work.
Btw, can you make the step by step guide of how did you do it, including setting up the network to talk with friends over cellular data and not a singular wifi connection? I am a newbie and not too much into linux, I personally find CLI’s a little hard to learn compared to GUI.
I know hard and soft basics however about linux, networking and more stuff.
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That is indeed a good idea, I will see if everyone’s ok with it.
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