Sounds great. For the email side of this, I'd love to understand better what Discourse is doing to decide how to send the email. No amount of legwork will help if I don't know what options Discourse can handle.
I just know there are lot of Discourse forums running for about $20/month or less.
Where does this 8gb ram requirement comes from? Could not find it... Seems quite a lot for a service like this. Do they even offer dedicated servers? Standard VPS is normally enough for almost anything.
If sending emails is the biggest cost, there are a multitude of specialist email gateways that could be cheaper. For example, https://www.authsmtp.co.uk have many pricing tiers, one of which is $96 per year for 5,000 emails per month...
Stumbled on that at some point when I was consulting Discourse community support. Stretched too thin this week to look for it.
I do not have the tech skills or experience to evaluate systems requirements, nor the time and interest to acquire it.
If we want to go the self managed path, we need a few experts knowledgeable and experienced in the specific related subject matter to team up and come up with a proposal to present to the community at the next General meeting. Proposal will need to address:
Without the above proposal, the community cannot evaluate if self management is a viable and economically sound path to take.
Anyone interested that fits the profile can subscribe to be part of that team:
https://the.fmsoup.org/g/SoupTechConsorts
You can change the name later if you don't like it. I thought of the BeefBrothBrethren, but then thought it is sexist...
For me, the forum is fine as it is. I don't think that this $100.- a month should be an issue.
Just my 5 cents.
… and another 10'000 cents for my funding for March.
btw, I'ld like to spend by banking transfer without PayPal OR ApplePay. What I would suggest is to publish all required information such as Bank and IBAN-Nr. here to give people a chance to pay ahead. I bet, with some encouraging words, we'll get the funding for the entire Year very soon!
Make spending process as easy as possible.
Yet another option for sending emails via Mailgun: Flexible Pricing & Email Delivery Plans - Email API Service | Mailgun
5,000 free per month. For $35/month you get 50,000.
Please remember everyone, all time costs.
If we consider self-manage, time isn't shared across the members here, it will once again be a few individuals. These individuals will also have changing priorities as time goes on and, perhaps they are able to help now, but possibly not in the future. Then we need other individuals and perhaps they will not be available at the time.
Personally, I'd rather see paid for responsibility, rather than rely on charity and I'm sure that anyone who could possibly take on self-management could also use that time elsewhere. In real terms, the hidden costs would work out more expensive for some people.
Just my two penn'orth
Andy
I share your thoughts on all these. I'm a bit reluctant to post financial info on a public site. I always communicate with the gifter a few days before the end of the month. Anyway, we will soon have the means to register as a nfp so the soup will have its own accounts. We already have 289 in the pot (target is 500).
I made such considerations on my behave many years ago. I came to the conclusion that the worst thing that could happen is a stranger dares to unrightfully transfers big amounts of money on my banking account.
Try me:
EfficientBizz GmbH
UBS Switzerland - IBAN-Nr. CH34 0022 5225 8367 9301 T
So... How much have you received 
I know y'all have looked at a number of potential solutions -- and that what you have here works well -- but just wanted to share that FMDiSC recently switched to Groups.io (using their free level). That free level includes email; it may or may not work for this group... Plans & Prices
Not sure why we are all discussing this again. The price being charged for a complete solution is very negligible and is going to be even less so soon enough. This is the best forum software I’ve used - let’s not try and reinvent the wheel again.
It is an additional piece of information and could be taken into account at a later, suitable time.
My suggestion had to do with the fact that other forums are using Discourse, and hosting for $10-20/month. If this site can do that, it shows respect for the donated funds. $100 donation would then cover 5 months instead of 1 month.
That's why we are discussing it. $100/month for ~200 members is out of scale.
Can you provide detailed information of another provider? I agree that it is cheap to host ourselves but this is now working as a service (the hosting and maintenance). Other hosting solutions would probably need more maintenance work.
Currently looking into the email piece more. I don’t know the technical side of how it works with Discourse. Once I understand the options, it’s easier to figure out how to handle that.
How about a micro-service using the JavaMail API? That's how several of my clients choose to use email with FMP (or other apps). Multiple attachments with FMP 12? No problem.
Of course, this is discourse, not FMP, but that's where the micro-service idea could shine .... if discourse can make simple HTTP calls or could be extended to do that.
If so, the email part would be free subject to any limitations of the email provider used to send emails from the site.
I'd be happy to help someone implement this as I've implemented micro-service-based email 2 ^ N times already.
Just another idea.
$50 is not though. That is a decent price for an inclusive package of hosting, security etc.
Presuming that with "e-mails" you mean the notifications that we get, when there is some reaction to one of our posts, I wonder if this is actually necessary?
Sure, it is a convenient thing to get notified, but once there are too many posts coming in I always start thinking about turning it off. So maybe you could stop offering that feature completely in order to keep the costs down? I personally gaze into the soup every day at least once anyways, so I don't really need that function.
I dont use email notifications as well but that does not mean that everyone do as I do. Email notifications may increase the involvement so it is an important feature to have.