🗣️ Forumly
Your community, your server — forums existed before SaaS pricing did.
Forumly at a glance
| Price | $39, once — no renewal |
| Replaces | Circle at $89+/mo — roughly $1,068 a year, every year |
| Type | Self-hosted web app |
| Platforms | Your own server (VPS / Docker), any browser |
| Category | Utilities |
Forumly features
🗂 Categories, threads, replies
One-level nesting for readability, thread pinning and locking, and new-since-your-last-visit indicators.
😀 Reactions
A six-emoji reaction set with toggling and per-member state.
👤 Member profiles
Avatar or generated initials, bio, join date, post count and a manual-award badge system.
🔔 Notifications
Reply-to-your-thread and @mention notifications with an unread bell (email digest is a stub — wire your own SMTP).
🔍 Search
Across thread titles and post bodies, with snippets.
🛡️ Moderator tools
Pin, lock, delete any post or thread, ban members, award badges and manage categories behind a separate admin password.
🚫 Spam defense on every write
A hidden honeypot that gives bots a fake success, a minimum time-to-post, and a per-IP sliding-window rate limit, all tunable via env.
$39 once — that's the whole pricing page
Circle charges $89+/mo — roughly $1,068 a year, every year. Forumly is a single payment, and it keeps working whether or not we ever sell another copy.
Or get Forumly inside the full suite — every app in the catalog, currently $97 for the bundle. See the bundle →
Forumly guides & pages
Honest answers
Is it really free on GitHub?
Yes — Forumly is MIT-licensed at github.com/bensblueprints/community-forum-mvp. The $39 buys the packaged installer and 1-click setup; building from source is free.
Does it do courses and payments like Circle?
No — it's deliberately just the forum. If you need courses, payments and video, Circle does more; Forumly does the discussion board and owns its data.
Where does my community data live?
In one SQLite file on your own server that you can copy to back up. No cloud, no telemetry.