I see that there is a plugin available for subscriptions for Discourse forums. Why isn’t this capability being supported natively inside of the Hosted Discourse product? Not only do subscriptions give forum organizers a way to pay for costs, but it also creates an economic model for Discourse to do what Patreon is doing. Patreon has terrible discussion features, and to me, it makes zero sense to sign up for Patreon and try to integrate Discourse when Discourse is actually where I want people to spend 99% of their time.
9 Likes
The question reminded me of this post: Forum maintenance cost - #26 by sam
2 Likes
And why do they make you pay $100/month to start using this plugin? I expect that the first year I try this experiment I will have less than 100 people in my Discourse forum, maybe even five or 10 people, while I work out the kinks and start to pressure for migration. I want to have the ability for people to subscribe even before I have the economics in place to make any of it worth doing.
1 Like
You can always host discourse on your own infrastructure if you are willing to undertake maintenance and it’ll cost a fraction of $100/mo. A good starting point for a community if you don’t have the economics in place yet.
2 Likes
Hosting it myself will cost me many multiples of $100. You have to amortize the cost of the hardware or virtual hardware/bandwidth, and you need to correctly calculate the value of your time to administer it and constantly be vigilant in logs looking for fingerprints of a hack.
My point was that I am not going to be making money on this for a year and I don’t understand why I have to spend $1200 for a handful of users, just so that I can set up a subscription plan.
1 Like
Well, Your calculation is not appropriate.
Even when you don’t make money, the host still has to keep their infrastructure powered, up and running to keep your site alive. In addition to that, they too have to pay their staff to manage both the hardware and software.
About self hosting, a vps on digitalocean able to host discourse is approx $15/month for a small site. installers will install it for you for a fee of ~$100-150 and you can request the stable branch which is not updated as often and only needs occasional maintenance which shouldn’t take more than 30 minutes of your time. Even if you hire someone twice a year at $150/hr to maintain your discourse server, it still rounds up to approx $650 a year. If you do it yourself, hosting bill is only $200.
4 Likes
So… what do you propose be done by Discourse? I’m curious, because I don’t see that it could be economically viable for Discourse if they were to host it for free until you make money from the forum. Or perhaps it’s that more plugins be allowed on lower plans?
I’ll cut that even lower. DO is somewhat expensive and 5-7 eur (plus VAT as usual) is quite resonable. Using two container setup takes around 30 secs per upgraiding. And there is no need to looking for malicious fingerprints.
But sure, it would be nice if an enterprise is giving freebies. But there is no such thing as free lunches, so…?
A few years ago I was spending about $100 annually. Presently my annual costs are approx $175 - dominated by mailgun, who recently doubled their prices, probably not the cheapest.
- domain name (namecheap) $18.50
- mail service (mailgun) $91
- hosting (hetzner) $65
2 Likes
I have my own SMTP server (mailinabox) and discourse on the cheapest nodes at hetzner.
The 2 nodes cost approx $10/mo
And the domain is another $12/year.
So it falls well below $150/year if you’re willing to manage two servers in your spare time every other weekend.
2 Likes
He’s proposing discourse bill his users for the privilege of using his forums that are hosted by someone else (cdck in this case).
Because discourse already offers tools to automate this.
1 Like
We consider a variety of factors when determining what plans to make different features available, and we do revisit those decisions from time to time.
I could see a world where it is available on a lower plan, but we need to take into consideration whether appropriate limits are in place between different plans, and the cost to support our customers on each of them.
For the time being, aside from the options of upgrading now or hosting things yourself, another to consider is to first prove out the value of your community without a subscription model, and then layer that on later, once you’ve done so.
4 Likes
Which is why Discourse charges $20/month for a small site…. It’s not clear what your point is. I have a small site for the first year, and I want to pay for a small site. I want the subscription service in place so I can build content around that structure.
1 Like
Yes, I want to offer a subscription service while on the entry-level $20/month plan.
I never asked for anything for free. I want to pay for $20/month plan, which more than covers the handful of users I will have at the start. I want to be able to use the subscription plugin even early on because I have to build structure around that.
I am not going to offer very much free content on Discourse. My members already get plenty of free content on Facebook.
We have learned that the support load that the subscription plugin creates is expensive and therefore it doesn’t make business sense to allow it on Starter. The decisions we make aren’t arbitrary.
3 Likes
In your experience where have most of the support issues been focused? Is it about people wanting refunds, chargebacks to credit cards, or help getting the feature to work?
Is there any way for me to use my own back end processor (e.g., Shopify) to offload that work from Discourse?
You have a test forum that gets recycled daily. It would be great if you would integrate a fake subscription interface into that, and show how some categories of content are hidden until you get the subscription? It would be helpful to just see how the product works, in an environment where there is no real money involved.
2 Likes
You have your options:
Either upgrade to a higher plan,
Or Self host discourse
Both of those will allow you to get the benefit of subscriptions plugin as you may please.
Debating with everyone around your idea of how a product should be offered is not magically going to change the offerings overnight.
You mentioned that you have experience of communities since usenet days, how many communities have you seen since those days till up until very recently that forced a subscription from the get go and were able to attract a significant number of users?
You can spend days on days debating whether a plugin should be offered on a given tier or actually go on and focus building your community. Choice is yours.
3 Likes