Discourse

Discourse suits teams whose customers answer each other rather than filing tickets. The company is Civilized Discourse Construction Kit, the code has been GPLv2 since 2013, and the audience never costs anything.

Two commercially different products. On Discourse hosting, Pro is $100 a month and Business $500, above a free tier that takes no card. You buy a site, not seats: staff seats cap at 2, 5 and 15, members are unlimited on every plan, and page views, emails and storage decide when you move up. Self-hosted, the software costs nothing at any scale. AI arrives as daily credits, 100k to 5M by tier, at one credit per request or response token, and the plugin sits in the same open codebase, so self-hosting moves that cost to a model provider rather than deleting it.

Access is where the plans bite. SSO over OpenID and OAuth2 starts at Business, SAML at Enterprise, and reporting, automation and the data explorer sit at Business too. Migrating in costs a year of hosting up front. No annual price is published, no trial length, and no rate for exceeding a day's credits. On hosted sites the restore button is disabled and a backup including uploads needs a support request first. HIPAA data is contractually excluded.

Bettermode and Circle sell a similar community shape as closed SaaS, so the database stays theirs. Flarum is free to self-host too, with no vendor-hosted tier to fall back on. All four are community forum software.