Discourse pricing
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Sources
- https://payments.discourse.org/buy/
- https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/
- https://aws.amazon.com/ebs/pricing/
Standard plan
- t2.small instance - $13.14 / month
- 10GB of storage - $1.00 / month
- 100k monthly pageviews
- assuming 1MB per page - $8.70 / month
- assuming 3MB per page - $26.28 / month
- assuming 10MB per page - $87.80 / month
- assuming 100MB per page - $878.82 / month
Business plan
- t2.medium instance - $26.28 / month
- 50GB of storage - $5.00 / month
- 500k monthly pageviews
- assuming 1MB per page - $43.86 / month
- assuming 3MB per page - $131.75 / month
- assuming 10MB per page - $439.36 / month
- assuming 100MB per page - $4201.50 / month
Enterprise plan
- t2.large instance - $52.56 / month
- 200GB of storage - $20.00 / month
- 3M monthly pageviews
- assuming 1MB per page - $263.58 / month
- assuming 3MB per page - $790.93 / month
- assuming 10MB per page - $2541.34 / month
- assuming 100MB per page - $21326.92 / month
Now, most page views (on either Discourse or NodeBB, or for that matter any site on the internet) are less than a megabyte. In fact, to get more than a megabyte, you'd need to have no caching for any of your scripts and also have an image on the page that was about a quarter of a megabyte.
Also note that nowhere do they mention backups of any kind. Let that sink in for a while.
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What you're really paying for is the support contract, or, "getting to tell Jeff what to do".
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What you're really paying for is the support contract, or, "getting to tell Jeff what to do".
How much does it cost to get to tell Jeff to bend over?
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$99 One-Time Install None of our current plans fit your budget? For a flat one-time fee, we can install Discourse in the cloud for you. Please note that a $10/month hosting fee is still payable to the cloud provider (Digital Ocean), and that this option is completely self-support after the initial install.
100$ to run a docker container. Is the installation process really so broken?
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That's still pretty expensive for
SPANK SPANKBITCHCOMPLAIN driven development though.
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Is the quota of staff users a new limit? Does having the Discodevs as staff count towards the limit?
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If you pay them $20/month for a free SSL certificate, they'll double the number of staff users!
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If you pay them $20/month for a free SSL certificate
How much do you think Let's Encrypt pay for SSL support?
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Hosted software plans are not really directly comparable to raw infrastructure costs. Mostly because you need ops effort, which can be non-trivial, esp. with software like this. They also seem to be using their own hardware for the hosted plans, so that has a potential to perform far better than AWS instances.
Does that warrant 1000$/month plan, and for Discourse of all things? Probably not. But it's an offer aimed at probably large companies, so it's not really surprising.
Also note that nowhere do they mention backups of any kind.
Or availability SLA. Always a good sign when details like that are hidden behind 'give us your details, everything will be fine' forms.
How much do you think Let's Encrypt pay for SSL support?
Well, since that site uses COMODO-issued certificate and Discourse CDN, probably $20/month.
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Let's Encrypt has a COMODO-issued CA certificate.
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I'm pretty sure they're using DO droplets.
Dicksaws host on their own hardware. It's multi-tenanted. They had at least one bug where data leaked between customers.
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Fuck me that's unlimited liability territory in my industry.
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Let's Encrypt has a COMODO-issued CA certificate.
CA certificates are not issued. And the cross-sign comes from IdenTrust, not COMODO. See https://letsencrypt.org/certificates/ (their site also has IdenTrust cert).
Discourse sites seem to use various CAs, maybe they just pick whatever's cheapest at the moment. Dunno. At the very least it's not issued by LE itself. And then again the $20/month price might just be for a privilege to install a certificate, because that's not uncommon.
I'm pretty sure they're using DO droplets.
They're talking about it on their blog. I did check.
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They are funding the development with their hosting and support service. There isn't nothing wrong with this, it's the same strategy as nodebb.
Only problem with that is that they have no incentive to make installing and maintaining it any easier.
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MAN 1 I need one twenty-nine-cent stamp.
APU
That's a dollar-eighty-five.MAN 2
I'd like two dollars worth of gas, please.APU
Four-twenty.MARTIN
How much is your penny candy?APU
Surprisingly expensive!
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same strategy as nodebb
You mean that company that also tells you that they back up your data and gives you a SLA for uptime, doesn't charge for a free SSL cert, and gives you almost an order of magnitude more pageviews per dollar?
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t's the same strategy. The same way a thoroughbred greyhound bred for racing and an overweight poodle that's never walked more than two steps in its precious little life are both dogs.
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Now, most page views (on either Discourse or NodeBB, or for that matter any site on the internet) are less than a megabyte. In fact, to get more than a megabyte, you'd need to have no caching for any of your scripts and also have an image on the page that was about a quarter of a megabyte.
Um, this may be obvious to others, but I have to ask: How exactly is a "pageview" defined when dealing with infini-scroll?
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Discourse has a very confusing definition of pageview, compared to any other software. If you keep hitting F5 it won't increase your view counting.
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So, they're counting only views which make the view counter go up?
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They aren't enforcing those pageview numbers
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Repeating myself because wrong topic. Discourse doesn't want to allow me, but I insist.
Our tracking code only counts "1 API request" for a topic view weather you scroll through a 1 million post topic or not.
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Now, most page views (on either Discourse or NodeBB, or for that matter any site on the internet) are less than a megabyte.
Did they fix that bug where a complete list of all post IDs in a thread was sent on each partial load of the thread?
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If not, then on a big topic the IDs alone could constitute a significant part of that megabyte.
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Did they fix that bug
where a complete list of all post IDs in a thread was sent on each partial load of the thread?
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Oh, this seems to be still broken.
When I look at the status thread, each new portion of posts yields a 300kB JSON response.And it is mostly IDs
example URLThe Discourse team fix bugs? Oh, you poor innocent fool...
You were right, nothing is fixed :)
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If it wasn't for the avatar CDN story, I wouldn't believe that they're doing it without some good reason that would be very hard to workaround.
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Whatever that reason would be, it would not be good enough.
Managing a big list of posts (some of which may be deleted) is the core of forum software. It is the main thing the backend devs of a forum need to solve.
It is not easy, but definitely something that needs to be carefully designed before a forum is made.
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They'll need to fix it to keep their support for over 100K post topics on Discourse 1.6 anyway.
A CTRL+F5 refresh on this topic was around 800KB for me
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But they don't use AWS, they use that hipster all open source-y cloud service I can't remember the name of.
Also missing from your analysis: they put more than one Discourse instance on a single cloud server (and sometimes make bugs that cause cross-contamination of contents), so they're not even paying those amounts.
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How much do you think Let's Encrypt pay for SSL support?
Nothing; they get it comped by some internet security company. Which is why they also have to pretty strictly rate-limit requests, which will murder you if you have a lot of subdomains. (Then again, you get what you pay for I guess, so it's hard to complain.)
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which will murder you if you have a lot of subdomains
If you're okay with your subdomains being known, you can request them all in the same cert.
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carefully designed
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I tried to like the OP and, I kid you not, this is what happened:
What happened to 504 OK?
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What happened to 504 OK?
You have to pay
20k/mon
for that now. All this time you free riders were enjoying free504 Ok
but from now on you only get500 Ok
and no higher. Ok? Ok.
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okay with your subdomains being known
They'll all be known always because they're in the DNS records?
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DNS records aren't handed out unless someone requests them.
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They'll all be known always because they're in the DNS records?
How would that work? You just do a billion trillion DNS lookups based on every combination of letters possible and keep track of the ones that worked?
EDIT:
DNS records aren't handed out unless someone requests them.
^- What Ben L says
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Huh, I was under the impression that you could look up all the subdomain records somehow. Apparently I am incorrect. TIL.
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You used to be able to by using a xfer request. That is all locked down now, unless someone does something really stupid when setting up their DNS server.
That being said, you can sometimes get lucky on Alexa and there are pentest tools that can help expose that information. But, attempting to do so is basically the same as a DOS attack because you spam the DNS server and see what returns a result.
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And there is no such thing as a wildcard DNS entry.
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You can pay MediaMarkt 60€ to come to your home to setup your SmartTV.
Anyway, those US$100 sound a lot like an hour of support, so it's probable that's how long it takes them... Probably longer.
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What you're really paying for is the support contract, or, "getting
to tell Jeff what to doJeff to tell you you're Doing it Wrong™".
Filed under: FTFY
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@Yamikuronue said:
Which just makes it even more of a waste of money, since we got that experience for freeWhat you're really paying for is the support contract, or, "getting
to tell Jeff what to doJeff to tell you you're Doing it Wrong™".
Filed under: FTFY