You can do the same with discourse.
No. You don’t have to have cdn or s3
3 Likes
I think for now I will stick to using a company like Communiteq where I just need to install and focus on managing the community. With self-hosted, if something wrong happens, I need to go and do a lot of research on things I don’t understand, and that doesn’t mean I will be able to fix them, then it’s way more stressful. I just want to focus on building and growing the community for now. Maybe in the future…
Thanks for clarifying the CDN and S3 thing (I would still need to deal with the emails service, which I have no clue how it works, so that’s an obstacle for now).
3 Likes
That’s a great idea. I’ve worked with many clients who have been very happy auth them. Literatecomputing.com can also help. But you said that with phpbb you just installed it yourself. I was pointing out that Discourse is no different.
3 Likes
It’s a common observation that lower tier customers require more customer support than higher paying customers. There are a few reasons why that could be true. I’m guessing that somewhere around 80% of customer support requests could be eliminated with a well implemented LLM assistant, so maybe this is something that will change in the near future.
3 Likes
Literatecomputing seems more focused on self-hosted Discourse, right? Which is not what I want at the moment, at least. But thanks for sharing. Will keep that in mind if one day I decide to go that route.
Regarding phpBB: I liked it when I installed it, but since I knew about Discourse, it feels more like what I would like to use. More straight to the point, most things I would expect from a community, is already installed and ready to go, without having to install additional extensions and all that.
2 Likes
Why you so against self hosting on Digital Ocean for instance at 10 bucks a pop? It’s not hard to do nor maintain. Then if you forum takes off look at other options as its easy to move by doing backup.
1 Like
I know how these things end up being (been there, done that)… me being frustrated that I need to do research on things I have no idea how they work, spending countless hours in forums, etc, to then realize that the best option was to just pay for a monthly plan on a company that takes care of everything for me.
Just looking at their installation instructions here, I’m already feeling stressed.
According to their page on how to install Discourse, I also need to use a service like Mailgun, Sendgrid, etc, which is not free above 100 emails a day. And if by any chance it goes above that, then the paid plans plus DigitalOcean (if it’s indeed $10), ends up being more than I would pay with for example Communiteq.
At least with this option, I can focus on just building the community.
If I self-host and something wrong happens, I know I will have to spend more time trying to understand what’s happening, which is not ideal for me at the moment.
Looking at DigitalOcean’s website, I don’t even know what any of that is: Droplets, etc.
I use Hostgator with cPanel for my websites, and that’s it. That’s my limitation when it comes to hosting services knowledge.
I’m not “against” self-hosting per se. I’m against having another thing to manage on top of 3 websites, 7 social media accounts x3 music projects (so 21 accounts), 10+ email accounts, making music for those 3 music projects along with cover artworks / promo images and videos, etc. Already too much on my plate for now.
5 Likes
It’s self hosting with a dashboard to do command line updates and/or someone to help if something goes wrong. You can do nothing and we’ll see that critical updates are done.
1 Like
Those are the wrong instructions. You want the official install instructions.
3 Likes
That didn’t minimize the amount of stress I can see myself having by going the self-hosted route 
But I appreciate the link. I just feel that this is too much for me and as mentioned, I know that along the way I will feel like the best option would be to go with a solution that is not self-hosted.
Maybe in the future, with more time and some extra help from someone who’s good at this.
4 Likes
So now do you understand the pricing structure. In my opinion Discourse have set the price that way to get rid of hassle. I too hate their pricing structure but i get it (however if you do go over page views there pretty cool about it ). If your serious about running a forum though you should learn a little.
At the end of the day Discourse is open source and your getting a FREE platform that has cost millions to produce
1 Like
This will be a very long reply, but since I feel that we are a bit walking around in circles here, with each person having their own perspective, I decided to just share all my views on this so maybe we can all move on.
I appreciate all of your feedback, though. Some replies pointed me to some good resources, so that’s net positive.
If you have no patience to read it all, I understand it. I just wanted to share everything at once and will probably move on with it.
No, I don’t. Here’s why: if I need to learn XYZ things to make it work, it has nothing to do with an automated system offered by the CDCK team where everything is installed automatically and once you have it installed, most of the support can probably be done via this forum, since we are not dealing with technical issues that are supposed to be taken care by CDCK. So that doesn’t reflect the price structure at all.
There’s a misconception, in my opinion, that has been shared in this topic and I totally disagree: just because I can afford paying $500 a month, has zero correlation to me being an expert and not needing more support than someone who pays $20 a month. Actually, from my own experience, it’s when you don’t have money that you tend to do more research and learn more things. If I know I have X members and Y page views that fit the $20 plan, why would I pay for the $500? So no, being on a lower plan has nothing to do with having the need for more support compared to someone on the $500.
I think that some people here are confused about this and let me give you an example:
There’s a difference between person A buying a cheap Ford vs person B buying a Ferrari. Different products, different quality (at least in theory, if you are paying more), different price. This is not the case with Discourse plans. You are not buying a better product per se. You are buying the same product, with more or fewer limitations. So the real comparison would be person A buying a Ferrari that only goes up to 50KM/h vs person B buying the same Ferrari but can go up to 300KM/h.
The thing is, person A is buying that Ferrari, cheaper, because they don’t want to drive above 50KM/h. They just like the car. Whereas person B wants to race other cars. When you are on the $20 that doesn’t mean that your forum sucks and doesn’t work properly compared to plan $500. It’s still a great product.
My issue, and that is what made me start this topic, is that:
1 - I think that the limitations should be more focused on features, components, plugins, theme, even limited number of categories that can be created, etc, and not on probably one of the main things that a forum needs: traffic (in this case, page views and the emails). Sure, there should be some kind of limit, but controlled by an automated system that analyzes if a forum for example with 10 members and 20 topics, should have 10 million page views and 500k emails being sent a day. That’s obviously ridiculous and something is wrong. When we build a forum, the main goal is to have a lot of interaction and that’s obviously through people jumping from topic to topic, etc, so it’s natural that page views go up. Now if a forum admin has to be constantly worry about the main thing that’s valuable for a community, that to me is a wrong way of doing things (from the CDCK perspective).
Using the car analogy: you can buy a cheaper Ferrari for $10k, but you can only drive 5km a day at a speed of 20KM/h. Makes no sense. It would make sense that the limitations were more related to what the car comes with: maybe without radio, no AC, non-warmed seats, etc.
2 - The difference in plan price is just ridiculous. If I have a community that is growing fast, going from $20 a month to $100 is like paying $500 for food every month and suddenly saying that you are adding a new member to the family and now you are paying x5 times more: $2,500.
Communiteq has plans that let the user grow, one step at a time. Going from $20 to $50, for example. If they can do it and manage it, I would guess that CDCK could as well. I obviously don’t know how both companies work, but that’s just a guess, especially, as I said, when everything is pretty much automated.
So if you “hate” it, that means that probably something is wrong. There’s a difference between hating something because you can’t afford it (that’s on you), and something that doesn’t make sense to most users (that’s on the company). I don’t hate the company Ferrari for making super expensive cars. It’s their product and if I can’t afford it, it’s on me. Now I would hate it if a cheaper Ferrari would cost me $10k and was super limited where I could barely drive it, and if I wanted to have a better car that behaves like a normal car, I would have to pay $1 million. That makes no sense, because the price vs the features are not proportional.
I don’t mind learning stuff. Being serious about having a forum, doesn’t mean I have to know how things work behind the scenes. I can be serious about playing guitar and I can dedicate my whole time being the best guitar player, but that doesn’t mean I need to know how to disassemble a guitar, how it works electronically speaking, etc.
Are you saying that someone who pays $500 a month for the managed hosting is more serious and therefore knows more about the technical side of Discourse than someone who decides to self- host? Because I can be super serious about my forum and pay $500, because that’s my main source of customer support, but someone who self-hosts and pays $20 a month on Digital Ocean and SendGrid, is just doing it for fun. No correlation here either.
I was never against paying for Discourse. I support it. Actually, me being more interested in paying for their plans is more supportive than someone who wants to self-host, right? At least I’m giving them $20 a month whereas someone with a self-host forum is paying $0 to CDCK.
So just to be clear: I understand that paying is good. I don’t think the limitations should be focused on page views or emails (even though some kind of system should be in place to control unusual traffic), but instead should be focused on features that can be used/installed. I think that the difference between each plan should be more linear (20-50-100-250-500, for example).
Everything else, if someone wants to self-host and learn more about what happens behind the scenes, great! It just should be clear that not everyone knows how to, or even wants to spend that time doing it. Some people just want to “plug and play” so they can focus on the community itself, not the technical side of things.
And that’s it. I will move on with this. Again, thank you all for sharing your views and perspectives. Even if we disagree, there’s always some parts that can be potentially beneficial.
Thank you!
4 Likes
Again, I appreciate it!
For what it’s worth, I agree with almost everything you’ve laid out here.
We’ve been evolving our pricing over the past couple years, but there are a number of moving parts.
As it continues to evolve, I think you find things aligning more closely with your expectations.
Again, I appreciate you sharing all your thoughts on this topic.
4 Likes
I agree with you entirely on the pricing structure, I am merely pointing out there are options that are not hassle. If you have 20 mins and want to go on team viewer, coming from a noob myself with Discourse i can show you how easy it is to setup and maintain. Mailgun has a free option too you know
However if your forum is serious go for the Standard hosted plan on here for £90 a month
Sorry for being slightly off-topic, but I want to add a bit to this story 
I think it’s always interesting to know how it works for competing forum-hosting companies, and how users react to such changes.
Because of their price change, and because users weren’t allowed to get their data back, some admins used website archiving tools like HTTrack or custom scripts to scrape their forum data and use it to create their new forum somewhere else with reduced data loss.
The thing is, each request made by these tools increased the number of page views and inevitably made them reach the upper limit of their plan, which meant they had to pay for that (from a free plan to 300€/year).
I also believe it’s forbidden by Xooit’s TOS, so using a scrapper is a risky move either way.
I believe reading that Xooit said page views are the primary cost of a hosted forum for the company, hence the limits. I don’t know what it’s like for Discourse.
Anyway, I agree with most of what you’re saying @alltiagocom, and I disagree with @Damian_Boon on how easy it is to self-host.
It’s always easy when you know how to do it. I’ve started from no knowledge. The only thing I ever had done in web stuff before hosting Discourse was hosting WordPress sites on OVH’s shared hosting. I needed the help of a tech-savvy friend to set up Discourse and even months after for various things.
I now have years of experience, I self-host multiple Discourse forums for myself and friends/family, but unless someone expresses their desire to learn and give time for this matter (or if I propose to fully take care of the technical stuff), I see no reason to recommend self-hosting. It will only lead to troubles at some point.
5 Likes
So true that.
If you remove the humans, customer service, and software development (very expensive!) this will be true for most hosting services — at the core they’re selling content delivery.
That doesn’t mean that pricing need to directly reflect that, but in my personal opinion it’s closer to reality than some other models. You can take the cost, divide it by the number of views, and roughly get an idea of what you’re paying per view. 20k views for $20 means you’re paying $0.001 per view.
I think a big problem with pricing internet services in general, is that expectations have been completely poisoned by free services operating at a loss that sell user data and advertising. Compared to a service that charges $0 a month for near-infinite views and storage everything seems expensive and limited.
Yes, but your guitar will inevitably need maintenance and it will cost you more money to pay someone else to repair — there’s always a trade-off somewhere, and you pay for the knowledge whether you learn it or someone else does. Maybe you give up playing guitar in a few months and never incur that maintenance cost, so there’s a bit of gambling in there too.
Businesses generally exist in the area where accumulated expertise and efficiency can be used to reduce costs to the point that people are willing to pay enough to produce a profit. This balance often needs fine-tuning, and all the feedback here will help!
11 Likes
Yes.
And it wasn’t that long ago that Discourse.org’s cheapest plan was $100/month.
3 Likes
One question, since this is not clear:
I’m assuming this is a plugin, right?
https://github.com/Arkshine/discourse-custom-progress-bar
If so, I guess I just install it like any other plugin?
No, it’s a theme component
1 Like