# You're invited to try the Discourse Free plan beta!

**URL:** https://meta.discourse.org/t/youre-invited-to-try-the-discourse-free-plan-beta/395632
**Category:** Announcements
**Tags:** free-plan
**Created:** [10 februari 2026 om 19:37 UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/youre-invited-to-try-the-discourse-free-plan-beta/395632 "2026-02-10T19:37:41Z")
**Posts on this page:** 1
**Showing post:** 38

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### Author: ![awesomerobot](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/meta/user_avatar/meta.discourse.org/awesomerobot/32/142900_2.png) [@awesomerobot](https://meta.discourse.org/u/awesomerobot)
#### Post date: [21 augustus 2026 om 21:22 UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/youre-invited-to-try-the-discourse-free-plan-beta/395632/38 "2026-08-21T21:22:50Z")

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The Starter plan is no longer available, we removed it as an option now that free is available… but clearly still have a little cleaning up to do.

> [@dowlass](#):
>
> 1. ‘You can have upto 10 categories’…and I can choose what they’re called?

Yes, no plan restrictions for naming

> [@dowlass](#):
>
> 1. what **standard groups** are available, if any?

These are our default automatic groups

1. Admins
2. Moderators
3. Staff (combination of admins and moderators)
4. Trust Level 0
5. Trust Level 1
6. Trust Level 2
7. Trust Level 3
8. Trust Level 4

> [@dowlass](#):
>
> 1. private categories I assume to mean categories only viewable by a selection of members

Correct, you can’t use these on the free plan

> [@dowlass](#):
>
> 1. What is a **Discourse Hosted LLM**..? I have no idea what an LLM is!!

An LLM is a Large Language Model, which is what powers all the AI features you see services providing these days. You can use this in Discourse to detect spam, summarize topics, answer questions, etc with the [Discourse AI plugin](https://meta.discourse.org/t/discourse-ai/259214) which is pre-installed. Using our hosted LLM means you don’t have to sign up for a third party provider like OpenAI or Google Gemini for basic tasks that are within our monthly usage limits.

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_[View the full topic](https://meta.discourse.org/t/youre-invited-to-try-the-discourse-free-plan-beta/395632)._