Thanks Richard, unfortunately, we’re going to exceed the 500k Pageviews /month limit in the professional package, and we need Custom Plugins, so the lowest one that suits you is Business – being a non-for-profit, we cannot afford that.
Btw, do you get into an IP blacklists management nightmare because of the complimentary email sending you provide?
Can you please PM me with more details about your community and your requirements?
Once Discourse starts sending email, the forum has a pretty good opt-in. We only had two issues - ever.
The first issue was about a customer sending large amount of bulk invites to people that did not realize they opted in for this. (They actually did).
The second issue was when a forum that was converted from a mailing list started sending weekly digests to michelle @sorbs.net - of all people.
I ended up installing my own Mail-in-a-Box email in a $5/mo DigitalOcean droplet, and now can send infinite number of emails provided I comply with all regulations, SPAM-CAN etc. I’m not dependent on those mail services anymore, yahoo! And my spendings are limited to $5/mo. I can also add unlimited domains to my Mail-in-a-box instance.
UPD. Mail-in-a-Box is still serving me very well for multiple Discourse instances, as well as WordPress transactional email.
What I wanted to add as an update is that I’ve also been managing two Discourse instances for nonprofits, and for those I’m using SendGrid through Azure nonprofit credits, which is $3500/year, so basically free - more reliable and even cheaper than mail-in-a-box.
For another org I’m using Discourse for Project Management, and this is yet another case when going with mail-in-a-box is a safe solution since you don’t expect any ads or occasional spammy messages; therefore: