It is open sourced, that pricing is for them to manage an install for you. From the about page:

> We offer official Discourse hosting, or install Discourse yourself in the cloud in under 30 minutes.

> Discourse is 100% free open source forum software, now and forever.

I see, makes sense now. Did not find any mention of it while scanning the site though. Seemed like it was a paid service only.

I host one for my wife on a 5$ DigOcean droplet. It was a pretty easy install and updates have also been easy. I’d recommend it if you need this kind of solution.

Yeah I wonder whether they'd go SSPL if AWS started offering hosted Discourse.

Discourse is open source: https://github.com/discourse/discourse

The plans shown on the pricing page are managed plan. You can install it on your server without problem.