In 2007, CrazyEngineers got hacked. I was away at an outbound training with colleagues, and the site was running on Yahoo's hosting. The best advice Yahoo had for me: delete everything and start from scratch. I had no backups.
I spent the next three or four days and nights reading about server security, cleaning out the malicious code and restoring the site, one piece at a time.
That's the part of hosting cost nobody puts in a pricing table. The server is cheap. The person who looks after it is not.
So here's what Discourse actually costs today, both ways: on Discourse's own hosting, and on your own server. All prices were checked on November 11, 2026. Discourse has changed its plans twice this year, so check the pricing page before you sign anything.
Discourse's hosted plans
Discourse sells four plans. These are monthly prices; the pricing page doesn't publish annual ones.
Swipe sideways to see every column.
| Plan | Price | Staff seats | Page views a month | Storage | Custom domain | Login options |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Free | $0 | 2 | 500k | 5 GB | No | Social logins, Discourse ID |
| Pro | $100 | 5 | 500k | 20 GB | Yes | + DiscourseConnect |
| Business | $500 | 15 | 500k | 100 GB | Yes | + OAuth2 / OpenID Connect |
| Enterprise | Custom | Unlimited | 1M+ | 200 GB+ | Yes | + SAML (extra cost) |
Three things changed in 2026, and most pages that rank for this question still have them wrong.
The $20 Starter plan is gone. Discourse staff called it "deprioritized" in May and "discontinued" in July.
The Free plan is new. It's limited to 10 categories and has no custom domain. Discourse staff said in May that pricing will keep changing while they test it, and that they can't promise Free will last.
Add-on prices are no longer published. You can still buy extra page views, storage, emails and staff seats on Pro, but the page doesn't show what they cost.
The page-view cap is the same on three plans
Look at the page-view column again. Free, Pro and Business all stop at 500,000 browser page views a month. Bots and crawlers don't count.
So the jump from $100 to $500 doesn't buy you traffic. It buys 10 more staff seats, about 20 more plugins (Data Explorer, topic voting, calendar, gamification, automation), OAuth login and Discourse's standard migration help.
If your reason to upgrade is growth, Business won't help. You'd be talking to sales about Enterprise.
Discourse says your site "will never stop working" if you go over a limit. If you stay over "for an extended period", sales gets in touch about an upgrade.
One more thing if you're moving an existing community onto Discourse's hosting: migrations need one year of hosting paid in advance.
What self-hosting costs
The software is free and open source. Discourse's official install guide asks for a 64-bit Linux server with at least 1 GB of RAM and one CPU core. It recommends 2 GB and two cores. The installer runs inside Docker and takes about 10 minutes on a fresh Ubuntu server.
Here's a realistic monthly budget, from the providers' own pricing pages:
Swipe sideways to see every column.
| Line item | Bare minimum | Done properly |
|---|---|---|
| Server | $5–6 (1 GB at Akamai/Linode or DigitalOcean) | $12–24 (2–4 GB) |
| Email delivery | $0 (skip it, see below) | $1–15 (Amazon SES, Postmark or Mailgun) |
| Backups | $0 (on the same server) | $1–5 (provider backups, plus offsite storage on Backblaze B2 or Cloudflare R2) |
| Total | about $6 a month | about $15–40 a month |
That's our arithmetic from published prices, not a quote. Your numbers move with traffic and uploads.
Tip: Don't run the bare-minimum setup for a real community. 1 GB of RAM works for a test site. It struggles once members show up.
Three details catch people out.
First, email. The install guide no longer forces you to set up email. Skip it, and your members log in through Discourse ID, a sign-in service Discourse runs. You also lose email digests, mailing-list mode and reply-by-email. For most communities, digests are what bring people back.
Second, backups. Discourse backs up weekly by default and keeps the files on the same server. If the server dies, the backups die with it. Point backups to offsite storage on day one.
Third, uploads. If you move uploads to object storage to save disk, Discourse's own guide says you also need a CDN, and those uploads are no longer inside your backup. They need their own plan.
The cost nobody puts in the table
The server bill is the small number. Your time is the big one.
Discourse ships a new release every month, and patches in between. On November 10 alone, three patch releases came out. Your server sends you an email each time an update is ready. Someone has to run it.
Every plugin you add or remove means editing a config file and rebuilding the whole app. On a standard single-server setup, the community is offline while that happens, as members on Discourse's forum have pointed out.
And sometimes an update goes wrong. In July 2025, a self-hosted community on DigitalOcean went offline after an upgrade and stayed down for about a day, until the owner worked through a PostgreSQL update and a rebuild. That's one report, not a rate. But someone on your team needs to be able to handle it at 2 a.m.
Nobody publishes how many hours a month this takes. I won't make up a number either. Ask yourself a simpler question: if the community goes down on a Saturday, who fixes it, and how long until they can?
I learned this the expensive way on XenForo. Even simple changes needed developers, the good ones were always booked, and every small fix meant chasing someone who wasn't around. Discourse is better documented than most, but the work is the same kind of work. I've written more about that trade-off in self-hosted or fully managed: what should you pick on our community.
Managed hosting by someone else
There's a middle path. Discourse partners host it for you. Communiteq publishes its prices: $20, $49 and $99 a month for 250k, 500k and 1M page views, with unlimited staff, SSO, daily offsite backups and managed updates on every plan. Pay yearly and you pay for 11 months.
Other hosts like Koloki and Elestio don't publish usable prices, so I can't compare them here.
Which one makes sense
Self-host Discourse if you have a technical person who understands servers and forums, and you want total control. Large communities with an engineering team do this well. If you're tempted to go further and build your own, read build vs buy a community platform first.
Pick Discourse's Pro plan if you need your own domain, five staff seats and a handful of plugins, and you'd rather pay $100 a month than run a server.
Look hard before you pay for Business. Check that you need what $400 a month extra buys: seats, plugins, OAuth login, migration help. It doesn't raise the page-view cap.
For everyone else, remember what you're actually buying. Running a community and running its server are two different jobs. Pick the setup where your time goes to the members, not to the next rebuild.
I build Jatra, a managed community platform, so weigh my view with that in mind. We handle backups, security, updates and bug fixes as part of the plan, and pricing is quoted after a short call. If you're comparing Discourse with other options, see Discourse vs Jatra, Discourse vs XenForo and the Discourse alternatives for SaaS communities. If you're still drawing up a shortlist, start with how to choose a community platform.
Moving off a self-hosted Discourse later is easier than most platforms: its full backup contains your database and uploads, and you can take it anywhere.
