OneTimeYour community, your server — forums existed before SaaS pricing did.
Circle is $89 or more a month — over $1,068 a year — for a community suite where the part your members actually open daily is the discussion board. Forumly is that board, done properly. $39 once, on a $5 VPS with Docker or as a desktop app, all of it in one SQLite file you can back up with a copy-paste.
Forumly in 60 seconds
Everything in the box
Self-hosted forum with categories, threads, reactions, badges, @mentions, search and real moderator tools.
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.
Forumly vs Circle
Circle charges $89+/mo. Here's what actually differs.
| Forumly | Circle | |
|---|---|---|
| Price | $39 once | $89+/mo |
| Members | Unlimited | Plan-limited |
| Threads, reactions, profiles | Yes | Yes |
| Badges, notifications, @mentions | Yes | Yes |
| Moderation (pin/lock/ban) | Yes | Yes |
| Courses / payments / video | No | Yes |
| Your data | Your SQLite file | Their cloud |
| Self-hosted | Yes | No |
If what you actually need is the discussion board, Forumly pays for itself in 13 days of Circle.
Pick how you pay
Subscriptions if you want them — but the whole point is the lifetime tier.
Up and running in three steps
Buy once on Whop
One payment of $39 gets you the packaged Windows installer, or clone the MIT source at github.com/bensblueprints/community-forum-mvp and run it yourself for free.
Deploy or run desktop
docker compose up onto a $5 VPS to go public, or npm run desktop for an Electron window auto-logged-in as moderator.
Set your admin password
Copy .env.example, set ADMIN_PASSWORD, and your forum is live with the spam defenses already on.
Fair questions
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.
Related tools
More pay-once apps from the OneTimeSuite catalog.
More about Forumly
Every page we publish about this app — comparisons, personas, platforms and the problems it solves.
App profile
Stop renting. Own Forumly.
Self-hosted forum with categories, threads, reactions, badges, @mentions, search and real moderator tools.
Get Forumly — $99 forever