Introducing the Discourse Free Plan

Today, we're excited to launch a free plan for Discourse.

For more than a decade, Discourse has powered discussions for open-source projects, developer communities, and customer forums at companies like OpenAI, Asana, Atlassian, and Zoom.

Now you can spin up a real Discourse for your community - with no costs and zero friction.

What you’ll get

Our Free plan offers the real Discourse - everything you need to bring people together, with room to grow and scale. You get a community hosted on infrastructure we maintain, with automatic updates and backups handled for you.

The plan includes unlimited members - invite ten people or ten thousand - and unlimited chat alongside the long-form discussions Discourse is known (and loved) for. You also get two staff seats so you can bring on a moderator or admin, and a free subdomain at yourname.discourse.group.

We’ve brought the core of Discourse to the free plan: threaded discussion that scales, trust levels that promote your most engaged members to moderator status, full-text search, a clean reading experience on every device, and the email-in, email-out flow that keeps conversations alive for every member. The moderation and admin tools come too, so you can keep your community healthy from day one.

If your community grows beyond the Free plan, upgrading to a paid plan is simple, and your data, members, and history come with you - with nothing to migrate or rebuild.

Sign in, out of the box

Every Free site comes with Discourse ID, our built-in account system. Social logins are preconfigured out of the box - there’s no OAuth setup and no API keys, none of the configuration that can eat up your time. Your members sign in with one click, and you create your own Discourse ID in about thirty seconds when you start your site.

Who it's for

The Free plan is the fastest, simplest way for teams to build a home for their community. Whether you're an early-stage startup engaging your first users, an open-source project gathering contributors, or a company needing a unified space for support, feedback, and internal discussions - Discourse brings everyone together. No matter what you're building, everything stays organized by topic and effortlessly searchable, making a conversation from last week just as easy to find as one happening today. 

You own your community

A Discourse site is yours to run. As the admin, you decide who joins, what gets discussed, and how your space is moderated. We give you the tools to set the tone and enforce it - including the ability to flag posts, a review queue, automated checks for content that needs your attention, and granular controls over membership and permissions.

Our job is to give you a platform that makes meeting those responsibilities as straightforward as possible, and to keep improving those tools over time. All you need to do is invite members, get the discussion going, and keep your community active!

A good place to learn more is our Terms of Service.

Get started

Go to our pricing page, click Get Started on the Free plan, sign in with your Discourse ID, and enter your name and address. Branding - logo, colors, description - comes next, but you can change all of it later from admin settings.

Before you invite anyone, we recommend you seed the site: write a welcome topic, an introductions thread, and a couple of conversation starters. An empty forum is a hard sell, but three good topics are enough to feel alive. Then grab an invite link and share it - with social logins already wired up, joining is one click.

If you've been sitting on an idea for a community - for your product, your game, your podcast, your neighborhood - the cost of trying it is now zero. 

We can’t wait to see what you build!