Good afternoon lovely and helpful Discourse people.
Context
I run a relatively small but 20-year-old writer’s community on Invision Community 4. Currently, we have 30-something active users (out of 990) with 7000 topics (stories) and 103,000 replies. This is purely a hobby project, not a money-maker.
Since I’m not a very technical person, we host with Invision directly. While I’m happy with the service, the monthly fee has been going up by quite a lot. From $25 in the first years to $45 at present. This monthly price will probably increase again when we’re forcibly upgraded to the announced Invision Community 5.
These past months, during the first half of 2025, I’ve invested some of my spare time into researching the possible future paths of my community. I want to ensure the community’s future for the next decade. And I think Discourse may be the most future-oriented platform for us.
Concerns
- Avoid unrealistic price increases for the same basic service. We don’t use nor need any of the advanced B2B services. There’s a tipping point where it feels like we might just be better off with DIY.
- Avoid vendor lock-in with Invision Community 5. If we’re unhappy, there probably won’t be any compatible converters right-away. So I want to avoid that and get ahead of this risk.
Questions
- Conversion. There exist scripts to convert databases to a format that’s compatible with Discourse. However, I’m not fully confident I will be able to pull this off. There are people here who can help with this. I’ve watched videos on how to do it. And there are (outdated) tutorials out there. So far, I’ve not had any luck. Probably because (a) my lack of experience and (b) MacOS is not ideal for this either.
- Hosting. Self-hosting seems the most cost-beneficial path. Digital Ocean has Discourse droplets. Their price simulation for a community like mine was around $10/month. I’ve tried setting up one, but failed. Are there any recommended alternatives?
- Path forward. Is there a realistic scenario where we can achieve both the conversion and hosting for a price that’s below what we currently pay? Is it realistic to learn how to do this myself, or will the learning curve remain steep? Will I be spending more time debugging than actually writing?
Thank you for reading this far. I’m very much open to learning and being challenged on my assumptions.
