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: [image] Newbie trying to understand Pageviews Support Hi, I’m just getting started on the 14-day free trial, and trying to understand which plan I will need. I have two questions: Just me, creating my site for the first time, and flipping around the various Admin settings, I’ve already run up 250 page views. I got curious and clicked on two different pages, then clicked back to Admin, and it was up by 15 more page views. And I’m the only User! How are these page views calculated? What happens if I run out of page views in mid-month? Is the … 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!

This is a guide explaining how pageviews are tracked: [image] Understanding pageview tracking on hosted plans Hosted Customers bookmark This topic explains the difference between Discourse’s legacy pageview tracking method and the new pageview tracking that was introduced in September 2024. person_raising_hand Required user level: Administrator In September 2024, Discourse introduced a better way of tracking and reporting pageviews, providing more detailed insights into site traffic. For more details about how pageviews are tracked and what changed after the update, read this topic: Last edited by @hugh 2025…

[image] alltiagocom: 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? 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.

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.

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

[image] alltiagocom: 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. 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)]

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).

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.

[image] Jakke Flemming: if that company creates revenue enought to pay 20 a month 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.

[image] Coin-coin le Canapin: Besides CDCK (the company behind Discourse), there are other companies specializing in Discourse hosting, with different price ranges. I couldn’t find a way to find those. Any suggestions? [image] Coin-coin le Canapin: As Jagstersaid, “do you have ability to host by yourself”? Self-hosting will ask technical skills, and taking care of security/backups by yourself. 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. [image] Coin-coin le Canapin: I recently set a real-time donations progress bar on the forum and it was a huge :flexed_biceps: incentive for members to donate 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? [image] Coin-coin le Canapin: 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. 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?

[image] alltiagocom: 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. 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. [image] alltiagocom: I couldn’t find a way to find those. Any suggestions? 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. [image] alltiagocom: Is that something that can be installed or you had to create it yourself via custom scripting? 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. · GitHub. 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. [image] alltiagocom: Do you mind sharing what you use for hosting, emails, CDN, backups? 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.

Page views limit too low?

Product Support

NateDhaliwal (Nate Dhaliwal) March 7, 2025, 4:32am 3

This is a guide explaining how pageviews are tracked:

Topic		Replies	Views
Submit a free plan Product Support	31	5312	October 31, 2017
Why doesn't Discourse hosting include the Subscriptions plugin on the Starter plan? General subscriptions	28	1211	January 4, 2026
Installing discourse for free? Self-hosting hosting	55	2409	July 2, 2024
Newbie trying to understand Pageviews Product Support	4	373	August 2, 2025
A brand new discourse.org Blog	29	7340	April 21, 2017

Page views limit too low?

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