My recommendation would be to wait until you have a problem and at that point come up with the cash to pay them or move to self hosting. They won’t kick you off the second you pass the threshold.
Thanks for the response @pfaffman. It would still be quite useful to be able to have some estimate of when that would happen. I have a rough idea for the page view limit, but I am completely lost (and have no reference point whatsoever) for the storage limit.
Well, you can certainly estimate based on number of photos / pictures uploaded per person, per day. Average smartphone pics are about 2mb - 3mb these days but trending upward.
On the self-hosted install, you will have a 20gb disk, that will have to house the OS, standard Ubuntu packages, Docker, Discourse base image, backups, uploads, database, assets, etc.
In our managed hosting, those 5GB aren’t used by the OS, Docker Images and stuff like that. That 5GB is exclusively for uploads and manual backups.
I was confused by the thread I linked, and I did not realize that the numbers mentioned there are not comparable to the 5 GB limit. I assumed that storage is taken up by something that is not intuitive and not easy to predict. If it’s really just the amount of uploads and message text, then it’s fine (and predictable).