If you’re going to earn money with your forum, you should be able to pay for a business plan.
Of course you won’t be able to finance it from the very start - like with any other business you will have to do some investing upfront. That does not sound unreasonable to me?
Alternatively, you might want to turn your problem into an opportunity and offer some extra content for free in the first months while you build your user base.
You could also try Memberful which has a free trial Pricing | Memberful.com and it integrates with Discourse pretty nicely.
It’s as easy as you could reasonably expect it could be. Stripe work hard to make things as attractive to the B2B client as possible.
Self hosting is not hard you just have to be prepared to learn as much as you need and do need some spare time to devote to it (but is not remotely a full time occupation!)
If you aren’t prepared or able to put in the time (fair enough), buy a professional hosting plan or pay for someone to help you. Marketplace
I stated what I think I need, and I am willing to defend the reasons I might need it. After enough people tell me it is not going to happen I guess it will not happen.
The general rule in marketing is that if you advertise a paid service, you get a response rate around 1/2% to 2%. I have 15K users on FB and maybe 2K of those are active viewers daily. That suggests that for now I won’t get more than 100 of those people to make the migration.
What I make free and what I charge for is actually a difficult question and I need to do a lot of experimenting around that.
I guess this is similar to Patreon? What do you see as the main points in favor of Memberful? It looks like it is a structured web-hosting environment with a link to the Discourse community, tied into the membership levels?
That response rate it a bit optimistic, and Facebook groups in particular are notorious to migrate. I would be surprised if any meaningful numbers actually move over to discourse without a significant merit.
In practice, the communities that successfully migrated ended up losing at least some percentage of their fb member numbers and usually had very strong reasons to migrate out of Facebook.
You should start with a free community and work out on a strategy on why your Facebook group should actually migrate out to a new platform.
The right way to calculate the cost of a service is to assign a dollar value to your time required to administer it. In a past life I ran a network for my company that had about 20 network segments and three different firewalls, and we had significant hacks that took years to fully recover from. So I don’t just assume that a self-hosted product is safe out of the box. I understand fully that securing a product requires a significant commitment of time.
In the end, I might self-host simply as a way to learn how the product works, without having any members on board. Then I could lock down that virtual environment so nothing gets in, which relaxes my need to fully secure the OS and app environment.
I have no intention of getting rid of FB, and in fact unless FB sees my efforts as making the FB group larger, they would likely just shut me down. I see FB as a viral platform that will grow audience, and that audience is a captive group that will then consider whether they want more.
My group publishes DNA test data for probiotics and food ferments, and to be honest many of those coming over would be doing so just to offer financial support to me for the cost of that testing.
