It feels like even a single instance is using a considerable amount of power.
How exactly are you maintaining it for free?
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If i had to assume maybe through the buying of their paid plans?
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It’s a conversion funnel, a well-trodden and perfectly reasonable business practice 
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Correct—Free is a freemium acquisition tier which acts in many cases like an indefinite free trial, allowing community teams to work out what level of functionality they need.
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Thank you everyone for your help!
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How would you know how much power Discourse uses? It’s not AI. I hardly think that is a consideration.
I think by power they means hardware (the two are correlated), so, it depends on many things but we can start from:
Server Specifications
Requirement Minimum Recommended RAM 1 GB (with swap) 2 GB+ CPU 1 core 2+ cores Disk 10 GB 20 GB+ OS 64-bit Linux Ubuntu LTS
From https://github.com/discourse/discourse/blob/main/docs/INSTALL-cloud.md
A recommended specs server start around 5€ on several providers, not counting domain/email/etc…
Way cheaper for CDCK to host their own forums on their infrastructure, I suppose
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