No starter upgrade option

I have a free community and want to upgrade to Starter but it doesn’t offer that option. What is going on?

I refuse to start a Pro trial and should not be required to activate the Pro features. I simply want starter. Why is this setup this way? Why can’t I just upgrade to the plan I actually want?

Clicking on Upgrade ONLY displays the Pro option for $100USD/mth - not what I want.
Clicking Compare Plans shows the Starter plan but offers NO OPTION to start a community on Starter - which wouldn’t upgrade my existing community anyway from what I understand.

What is going on here? Why would you prevent users from upgrading to what they actually want. This coercion to upgrade to a Pro trial is leaving a bad taste in my mouth.

Are you sure? The “upgrade” button prompts me to buy Starter.

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Well that would be great to see!

This is what I get on my instance:

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Hmm, maybe the team is A/B testing something. Weirdly I don’t even see Starter available on the plans page so something is going on here that I can’t explain.

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That page is currently the same for me as well - Starter plan is detailed below but not a selectable option.

Unfortunately you will have to wait for staff to clarify, I’m not sure if this was ever announced anywhere but it seems like theyre in the middle of A/B testing it.

We have deprioritized Starter on the pricing page, but it should still be available as an option to upgrade to from the Free plan.

Where are you clicking?

(It will show Pro or Business if you are clicking on a plugin that comes with one of those plans, for example)

Thanks for the reply.

If this is A/B testing they have 1 result - I’d sooner chew glass than start a Pro subscription

I’ve tried the Upgrade button on the Dashboard as well as the Upgrade hyperlink on the Account Settings page. The only option available is Pro - same dialog from both places.

I’d also like to mention that the pricing page also has nowhere to purchase the Starter plan either - it wasn’t just deprioritized, it has effectively been disabled entirely in my case, whether starting a new community or trying to upgrade my existing community.

OK, I think you should still see Starter there when clicking the Upgrade button. We’ll take a closer look on Monday.

Actually, I may have found what is causing the issue in your case. Try again now and I think it should work.

Thanks for your assistance Dave. I assume this was unintentional - but I nearly pulled the trigger on starting my own infrastructure to self-host instead. I really don’t need that kind of overhead for a very small community that is just starting out. I felt betrayed and angry that the system was trying to push my brand new community into a full Pro package that we don’t want or need quite yet. I would love to have the Pro level, don’t get me wrong, and we love the platform you’ve built. I also want to support open-source projects and value that business decision highly - which is what brought me to this platform in the first place. I had no experience with Discourse prior to a week ago, and stumbled upon it when looking specifically for a project like this to support - that’s where the feeling of betrayal came from. I moved my people here looking to support this exact business model. We are a private group, not a business, and I’m paying for it personally from my own pocket with no income potential.

Thank you for addressing this, I appreciate it very much!

I tried again with a refresh as well as logout and login, but still only have the Pro option dialog when clicking Upgrade.

Hmm… OK, we’ll have to take a closer look.

Hang tight and we’ll do that when the week starts and sort it out with you.

Just checking in, is there any update on this issue? I still don’t see the upgrade to Starter available from anywhere.

@mcwumbly

starter is definitely still an option, or it should be

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Yes, it shows the details for the Starter plan but there is no button to actually select it. Likewise, if you check the screenshots that I attached above, the Upgrade options from the admin dashboard only offers the Pro subscription. It is currently not possible for me to upgrade my community to Starter edition through any page or dialog.

Looks like you’re able to upgrade to any plan now from your admin panel.

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Ah, from Manage Account it is now working. Admin > Dashboard > Upgrade Account still only provides Pro plan which I feel is still misleading, but I do have all options from Manage Account as you described.

Thanks to the team for getting this fixed for us!

Sorry for the trouble with this and I want to add that your bug report is appreciated

We discussed it internally and the issue is that the Free/Starter plans both have the same staff limit. So, our recommendation system skips over to recommend Pro but that’s not correct. Admins should still be able to upgrade to Starter, as they are within the staff limit and not over it. I’ll post an update here once we’ve fixed it.