Hi @rishabh, hi everyone 
Finally, a plan I’ve been waiting for! I applaud the initiative.
Thank you so much already.
Now, let me give you my opinion:
I find it really unfortunate that we have limited features.
If it were possible to offer many more features for this Free plan, such as category permissions, I would be very grateful.
What do you think?
Thanks in advance, and congratulations again!
This has been asked several times and the answer is always the same:
If you want more, don’t want to pay and aren’t eligible for free hosting, you need to self host. 
That said, what is available for free might change in the future, is not written in stone after all.
Or host with a partner like Communiteq 
I thought about it when I wrote my post but since it was about “don’t want to pay” I didn’t mention it 
But there sure are other paid options with different features and different plans than CDCK, on the market
I don’t see this covered in this discussion, but I am guessing custom domain names are not supported as part of the free tier?
Custom domains aren’t included in free hosting (open source / creators) either.
I don’t think that they are available on discourse.org’s Starter plan for that matter.
They are available with communiteq.com on their lowest tier though (which is why I went with them for one of my sites). They can even allow you to use a folder on your domain (i.e. yoursite.com/discourse) instead of a subdomain, but I’m not sure what tier you need to be on for that.
I was about to write that, too. The table at Discourse pricing | Discourse - Civilized Discussion shows which plans allow custom domains.
This is a great new feature launch, congratulations discourse!
I haven’t used the discourse ID feature until now since is necessary to found a hosted site with this free tier.
Interesting question here:
(Discourse ID feature)
Answer:
I’m not sure what the benefit/reason is for that to be required to stay enabled. Also can’t think of why to disable that except for to limit new account creations.
It needs to stay enabled as it’s the only login method on the Free plan and yes you’re right, there’s no need to disable it. We’ve pushed an update that stops admins from being able to change that setting, so we’re all set!
Didn’t catch that this was the only login method for this free promotion, ok.
Support for two staff administrator/mods is good.
To clarify: it appears that one can make the entire site either private or public. It’s just that you can’t have a public site with some private categories. Correct?
Correct, yes, you can make the Free site public or private entirely.
Also, public sites also have a seeded Staff category that can be used. Additional private categories are off-limits on the Free tier.
Hi. I’m new to Discourse and investigating its potential for a community forum. The option of a free version is welcome, especially to try it out and experience the basics of the platform.
A couple of questions, though, regarding the below…
Same usage limits as our Starter plan, except that you can have:
Many thanks!
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.
Yes, no plan restrictions for naming
These are our default automatic groups
Correct, you can’t use these on the free plan
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 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.
Welcome to Meta 
This is the topic about the beta phase. Since then, the free plan has been officially released (see: Introducing the Discourse Free Plan) and has kind of replaced the Starter plan. You can see the limits of the free plan on the pricing page. I don’t want to copy the whole table, but here is the beginning, where you can see, for example, the limits for page views, emails, and categories.
Yes, you can choose the name of the categories you create.
The default groups in Discourse are a staff group, where both users with moderator status and users with admin status are. Additionally, there are 2 separate groups for these roles.
There are also default groups containing the users with each trust level and up: trust_level_0 for TL0 and up, trust_level_1 for TL1 and up, trust_level_3 for TL3 and up, and trust_level_4 for TL4 and up.
There are also pseudo-groups for logged_in_users, anonymous_users (those who are not logged in), and everyone (which includes both prior mentioned groups, but is probably removed soon). Those groups don’t appear in the group list, but can be used in permission settings.
There is a category only for staff, which is the only category not visible to all members of your forum. When your forum requires login for access, categories can still be private in that regard that they are only visible to members, but otherwise, your categories will be public.
‘An LLM is a Large Language Model, which is what powers all the AI features you see services providing these days.’
Yikes!! Well, you live and learn! LLM…my acronym for the day!
Thanks for the explanation!
Thank you, Moin!
I doubt I will understand how trust levels work - groups to me are just groups of people with a special interest or skill. or whatever. My groups would be things like medics, canteen, transport, equipment, communications… heaven knows, neither they nor I would have any idea what a ‘trust level’ means!
But I guess jargon is just one of the hurdles to be jumped in understanding how anything works these days!
Appreciate your thoughtful explanation…even if it’s not thoughtfully understood! 
Hi there! Did you see this doc linked above? It explains what Trust Levels are:
Hello Nate,
Thanks for reminding me - I didn’t have time yesterday to follow up all the links and learning I need to do! I’ve had a quick look and I can see the logic in it, even some common sense.
But for my planned forum, ‘trust’ is not an issue - from the start, anyone invited to the forum will be on a level with everyone else, all members would have parity, equal rights, equal access. The only exceptions might be a couple of staff (who make the forum world go round!)
I haven’t looked into this yet, or even whether it’s possible, but my intent is for a private, ‘closed’ forum, it would only be for invitees not the public. Trust is therefore not a big issue.
We do want our plans to be as clear as possible, so can you share what you mean by the “the link on Starter plan”? Did you mean Introducing the new Starter Plan! or something else?
EDIT: I fixed up the first post.
