Page views limit too low?

Support
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I just installed the Starter trial and from playing around with a single test topic and all that, I’m already at 100 views.
With a very moderate community of 100 people, if each generates 50 page views every single day (which seems pretty normal), we are already at 150k page views.
I see that other users have the same question:

So how can a small community survive if they are required to pay more than $500 a month in order to have a very average/normal amount of page views?
Or am I missing something here?

I would love to use Discourse, but this huge difference between the page views limit and the monthly fee, is impossible to sustain.

Thank you for any help and clarification on this!

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This is a guide explaining how pageviews are tracked:

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Getting money from somewhere else and then a forum is no-profit support type service. Or a hobby.

Or it is same as always — you have to pay from your own pocket until it breaks and you have enough paying customers. On my area, both graphically and by niche, it works practically never.

There is self hosted option too. My small forum pays itself showing ads to random visitors. It is close to 40 euro a month now, including domain, VPS, S3 and SES for emails, and I have traffic enough to get that and a bit extra.

My point is if you don’t have business, concept of business or enough free money, you can ’t use B2B as what CDCK offers. Or what ever service that is targeted to companies.

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That was my conclusion, too. I really liked Discourse, but realized that I couldn’t afford it.

I don’t have the desire or time to try to use the forum to generate ad hits, and I don’t want to annoy my customers with them. I just need a product support forum that my small business can afford.

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Then you have to think

  • if that company creates revenue enought to pay 20 a month
  • do you have ability to host by yourself; time question it is not
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Besides CDCK (the company behind Discourse), there are other companies specializing in Discourse hosting, with different price ranges.

As Jagster said, “do you have ability to host by yourself”?

Self-hosting will ask technical skills, and taking care of security/backups by yourself.

It will be considerably less expensive than managed hosting.

I own a decently active forum. It costs about 300$ a year (hosting, emails, domain name, CDN, backups), and is 100% funded by users’ donations.

The donations have been working very well for a few years now, even if it required sometimes several months until fees are met.

I recently set a real-time donations progress bar on the forum and it was a huge :flexed_biceps: incentive for members to donate. Instead of waiting months fo reach the servers’ annual fees, it only took a few days this year.

See the top left:

This image is a screenshot of the Unicyclist.com website, displaying a section of the homepage with various unicycling-related topics, including a list of popular forums and user posts. (Captioned by AI)
This image is a screenshot of the Unicyclist.com website, displaying a section of the homepage with various unicycling-related topics, including a list of popular forums and user posts. (Captioned by AI)2560×1305 317 KB

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Basically my issue with Discourse is how the plans have such huge differences in cost (from 20 to 100 to 500), how the page views are so limited, and how we can’t buy more page views or space on certain plans. I see there’s the option in the Standard to pay $50 a month for more page views and storage, but not on the Starter.
Going from paying $20 all the way to $100, it’s a huge difference.
And as mentioned, it’s pretty easy to reach the 20k page views with just a few users. I understand that page loads are not “free”, because it still uses resources, but for a product that is built for communities, page views shouldn’t be limited. Storage, yes. Access to certain plugins and features, yes. Limiting page views like that is like giving someone a Ferrari and say: you can’t drive faster than 40km/h (24miles/h).

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I totally understand that having something like this is either customer support, or a hobby. I see no issue with paying for it. I just think the plans are not very balanced.

Do you need the S3 and SES, if it’s a small community?
For example, I installed phpBB before and I just had to install the software. I was still able to upload files, receive emails, etc.

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I think the issue always comes down to how the plans were created. I don’t think the issue is paying $20. Most people and businesses can afford that. But with just a few very active members, the 20k page views limit is super low. I think the limits should be focused on plugins and features, not on page views. Of course that if a certain community has unusual page views based on members and all that, that particular customer could be “investigated” and see what’s happening, but other than that, page views for a forum, shouldn’t be limited. And the plans could be more like $20, $50, $100, $250, $500. That would give people more headroom to grow, step by step.

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I couldn’t find a way to find those. Any suggestions?

I believe that Hostgator doesn’t meet the requirements to install. I have to ask them, but I don’t think so…
When it comes to installing, I’m not an expert, but I can make things work with some research, now with ChatGPT/Claude as well, etc.
To be honest, I would rather just pay for the hosted plan, if it wasn’t so limited. It kinda creates that sense of “feeling choked”, always worried about the page views. Aren’t we supposed to being able to manage our communities without constantly looking at the reports? It’s a bit stressful, in my opinion.

This seems like a great idea. I like the progress bar. Is that something that can be installed or you had to create it yourself via custom scripting?

That sounds like a very good deal. It’s pretty close to the $20 a month.
Do you mind sharing what you use for hosting, emails, CDN, backups?
Is it hard to set up?

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I understand that. Recently, Xooit, a French forum hosting company (that refuses to give customers’ data back if they leave) increased their price, and many users were constantly looking at their “views” number to avoid being upgraded to a very expensive plan. Looking at their complaints, It seemed indeed pretty stressful.

There are some, the only one I know is Communiteq (@RGJ) , which is listed on Discourse’s trusted partners page: Discourse partners | Discourse - Civilized Discussion.

It’s not official, available at GitHub - Arkshine/discourse-custom-progress-bar: Adds a progress bar below Discourse's header that can serve various purposes..
If used alone, the progress bar values must be changed manually from the component’s settings.

As for me, receiving donations through ko-fi.com, I used their API and Discourse’s API to automatically update the “current value” setting when someone donated.

  • Hosting: I’ve been reliably using Hetzner for years, no complaints. It’s a German company, and they provide US locations only for certain VPS specs.

  • Emails: I used to use Mailgun, but it was expensive, and my usage was way less than their minimum paid plan. So I’ve switched to Amazon SES which is pay-as-you-go and whose interface is not user-friendly at all.

  • CDN: I needed a CDN to serve assets quickly for my international forum, I don’t use one for my French forums. I use Bunny.net.

  • Domain name: I’m not the one who pays for it :upside_down_face:

  • Backups: I used to host my backups on Amazon S3 as it’s natively supported by Discourse. Now, I use both server’s backups from Hetzner for +20% server price, and weekly sync Discourse’s backups on my Google Drive via rClone.
    I sometimes dream of a resurrection of Synchronizer-base for any backup provider. Or better, a native support for several cloud services.

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I forgot to answer this one. It will depend on the services you choose, and the features you need, I guess.

In any case, basic sysadmin skills will be needed. Access your server via SSH. Configure your DNS. Configure your email service, and so on.

Amazon SES is harder to configure than Mailgun, for sure. My backup synchronization with Google Drive, using rClone, is not hard, but is an additional steps that needs command line, CRON task configuration.
A CDN is not mandatory, depends on your need, and is also additional configuration. Etc.

The more services/features you need, the more failure points and related issues can arise.

Which is why managed hostings are popular. Most of the potential issues are in their hands, not yours.

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Wow… that must be stressful indeed! And that kind of behavior from those companies shouldn’t be legal, especially when Discourse itself is built on the premise that we own our data! There are some nasty people out there!

I actually asked Claude about some companies, and that was the first one. And I just LOVE their prices and what comes with it. The plans are more balanced, just the way I suggested on my previous post: $20, $50, $100, and with a HUGE difference when it comes to page views and storage! I will definitely check them out. And since it’s hosted with them, I just have to pay and manage my community, which for now is what I want.

Thanks! I will keep this info for when the time comes.

Thank you for the extra info on your hosting, emails, etc. I’m not familiar with anything Amazon related. I think for now I will use the Communiteq option, let the community grow and when/if it really becomes obvious that I should self-host, I will look into that info you shared. More likely to hire someone to do that for me.

Really appreciate the info! :raising_hands:

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Yes, for now I just want to focus on building the community. Maybe when the time comes, if I see that self-hosting is a better solution, I believe I will have the chance to hire someone who can do that for me.

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Feel free to reach me out then :slight_smile:

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Hey @alltiagocom, just dropping a brief note here to thank you for thinking out loud about our plans and pricing. We have been making some incremental changes in this area over the past couple years and are continuing to do so, so it’s very helpful to hear this kind of feedback.

(Here’s another recent topic on this subject: Newbie trying to understand Pageviews. Edit: oh, you already mentioned this one too, ha.)

We’ll see how things continue to evolve on our end.

But in the meantime, as @Canapin points out, you’ve got a number of options available to you, so I’m pretty sure you’ll find something that works for you.

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I can’t even pay those fees, no matter what is good or bad balance. So for me this is totally an academic question.

But somehow I understand that. It is semi-pollite way to keep small fish outside or guide them to pay more. CDCK tries to do as much revenue is possible. That is the main target and purpose of companies.

Small actors like me needs as much support than bigger. Or should I say they need different type support, but there is quite fast demand of same amount work hours. But if a customer pays for example 100 a month, it can offer only around 15 minutes worth of work a month.

And at that point 500 000 low price customers don’t generate that money under the last line that is needed to keep share holders happy, because they disproportionately add expenses that are not contingent upon the technical service level provided. The revenue comes from those 100 000 premium customers, who can pay needed work hours.

Of course I have zero understanding how CDCK calculates its pricing and profitability, but that is how the world works.

Sure. I don’t disagree. But I bought one sound editing app. Really fast I realize that I have to pay extra fee to get so called pro options, because all tools that are in fact needed to proper use (like MP3 export) weren’t included in normal price. I was dum enough to not check out that before paying, because then I would pay right away that pro subscription and get some discount.

The more affordable options serve as trial versions and a showcase, while the pricing strategy ensures that the customer inevitably transitions to price tiers that generate profit. Welcome to capitalism :joy:

And again. One option is self hosting. Then we pay the price generating visibility to software, doing bug hunting and beta testing, and someone can even carry out support on behalf of CDCK and to develop software for CDCK. TINSTAFL so we pay always someway.

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Thank you for replying.

From my point of view as a potential Discourse customer, feeling that my needs will be “choked” because of those hard limitations and very high costs, immediately makes me think of potential alternatives so in the end, you probably end up losing a lot of costumers that could start small and eventually become high paying customers, if you’d allow them to grow with smaller steps.

That’s just my opinion and I hope you end up finding that balance. It would be good for both parties, I believe.

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I think that when it comes to business what a lot of companies don’t understand (and in this case, using your example of the small vs big fish), is that small fish x500 is better than no fish.

And some of those small fish (fishes?) will become medium or even big fish. It’s an investment if CDCK wants to allow support. Also, when it comes to support, it can always be limited as it is now. Community support for lower plans, limited custom support to medium plans, priority support for higher plans.

And finally, in this kind of product/service, the goal is to make the customer dependent so they won’t leave. If I build a community of 1k people and everything is going great, why would I move everything to a completely new company instead of going from $20 to $50, for example? If I move everything, maybe I will have to pay for that migration service, my members need to learn a new platform (which will eventually make some of them leave the community completely), etc. So by introducing smaller differences in plans and not so tight limitations in page views and emails, the community grows, making it harder for the customer to leave, making it easier to upgrade, step by step, instead of going from $100 to $500 a month.

Yes, self hosting is an option to mitigate this, but then you have to deal with all the issues yourself, you need to either have someone who’s an expert to install and maintain everything, or you have to learn it yourself, which probably 90% of people who want a forum, are not. And maybe the extra you have to pay a developer here and there to fix or update things, is not that different from what you would pay going from $20 to $50 a month (in a year that’s $360 extra). Does it make sense?

My opinions here are more focused on a business plan that allows anyone to install and use Discourse, build a good community, and only focus on that.
As Communiteq very well says on their website:

We think this product is too great to be limited to a technical audience only (…) Choose our Discourse hosting services and never worry about hosting or maintenance. We keep it running — so you can focus on building your community.

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We can agree we disagree. That is not true quite often, and is same base than claim that every dollar is worth of same.

If I got 500 small customers that creates sales worth of 100, and they demands work worth of at least 100, it is way better to get no customers at all.

But you are missing now situation when there is 10 000 customers worth of 100 000. Then 10 000 customers worth of 100 and eating work time of those who are taking care of those big ones, is only minus, because there is just fixed amount of work hours. 100 buck customer needs same amount time than 100 000 buck customer — but they are paying less.

That is the issue. To take care of those small customers needs way bigger volume and then one poor dev must spend less time per client.

Well. That is choise of CDCK and your opinion is heard, I’m sure about it. But money talks.

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