{
  "slug": "discourse",
  "name": "Discourse",
  "url": "https://www.discourse.org",
  "cat": "rt",
  "group": "back",
  "tagline": "Open-source forum platform",
  "price": "Self-host free and open source. Hosted: free plan (2 staff seats, 500k pageviews, 5 GB); Pro $100/mo (5 staff seats, 500k pageviews, 20 GB); Business $500/mo (15 seats, 100 GB); Enterprise custom. 85% education and 50% non-profit discounts available",
  "tier": "mixed",
  "pick": false,
  "what": "Mature open-source discussion platform with categories, trust levels that grant moderation powers as members participate, a genuine moderation toolkit, full-text search, reply-by-email and a large plugin ecosystem. Ships a comment-embed mode that mirrors blog post comments into forum topics through a single script tag.",
  "why": "The serious answer when comments should grow into a community rather than stay a per-article afterthought. Embed mode gives you article comments today and a full forum later without migrating any content.",
  "warn": "It is a Rails app needing Postgres, Redis and Sidekiq, so self-hosting is real sysadmin work and the official floor is a 2 GB VPS. Communities also need active human moderators — trust levels reduce that burden but never remove it.",
  "install": "Run the official Docker discourse-setup script, or use hosted",
  "category": {
    "key": "rt",
    "name": "Realtime, comments & collab",
    "desc": "Live updates, comment systems, video, community.",
    "group": "back",
    "groupName": "Give it a backend"
  },
  "freshness": null,
  "health": {
    "ok": true,
    "status_code": 200,
    "final_url": "https://www.discourse.org/",
    "checked_at": "2026-08-18T18:09:22.039+00:00"
  },
  "corrected_at": null,
  "upstream_changed_at": null
}