Discourse hosted Free plan

discourse.org · Storage · 1 record · JSON

Discourse hosted Free plan Storage

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www.discourse.org/free · paas · storage/discourse-hosted-free-plan · JSON · compare

Free tier	5 GB storage per free site, with unlimited topics, chat and members unit GB; metered on stored-bytes
Price	none stated
Per-object cap	not stated
Retention	not stated
Egress	Free; uploads served from *.discourse-cdn.com behind CloudFront, so a Cloudflare/CloudFront cache sits in front already
Identity	email (placeholder) not published
Binding	none no constraint in the record binds at this scale; the record carries no limit of a kind the vocabulary names
Interface	rest, rclone rest
Tooling	Discourse's own REST API is fully available on the free site (POST /uploads.json with an API key, /posts.json, /latest.json); no rclone backend
Composes with	5 GB x N free sites. Free sites are self-serve from id.discourse.com/create-site with a Discourse ID; provisioning is rate-limited but per-hour, not per-account. 100 sites = 500 GB; 400 sites = 2 TB.
Reliability	Free plan launched 2026-02 and is still labelled beta; the provisioning throttle is the real scaling brake, and the 10-category cap makes bulk-upload workflows awkward.
Notes	5 GB storage per free site, with unlimited topics, chat and members
Evidence rung	reported One page read moves it to documented.
Checked	2026-10-21 (inherited); stale on 2026-11-04

Evidence (4)

date	source	what it proved
2026-10-21	meta.discourse.org/t/youre-invited-to-try-the-discourse-free	'Unlimited topics, chat and members... 2 staff seats, 5GB storage'
2026-10-21	www.discourse.org/free	'A real Discourse, free forever... No credit card - Unlimited members - Set up in about 1 minute'
2026-10-21	meta.discourse.org/latest.json	probe: GET -> HTTP 200 application/json (public read API works anonymously); POST https://meta.discourse.org/uploads.json -> HTTP 403 (write path auth-gated as expected)
2026-10-21	sea3.discourse-cdn.com/meta/user_avatar/	probe: GET ... -> 302 -> 200 via CloudFront (uploads are CDN-fronted)

Unknown or withheld values (7)

$.free_tier.notes process
$.identity_cost.detail defaulted
$.identity_cost.kind identity-defaulted
$.per_object_cap.notes not-extracted
$.per_object_cap.stated not-extracted
$.retention.notes not-extracted
$.retention.stated not-extracted

Built from commit 872967ae41, data as of 2026-10-27. Every value links to its source; freshness badges are computed in your browser. How to read this.