What does it cost in month twelve?
Answer
The same as month one. $9 one time for a portal on a Forumcat subdomain, or $99 a month for your own domain. The bill never grows with traffic or questions.
Customer community
A customer community
the support team can run.
Questions, answers, votes, and one accepted solution. Moderation and member management come with it. From $9 one time, and the bill does not grow with seats, traffic, or questions.
Free for 7 days. No credit card. Live in about five minutes.
5 minfrom sign-up to a live portal
5roles, so the whole team can answer
$9one time for a working portal
7 daysfree, no card needed
Scope
When to start a customer community
Start when the same question reaches you three times in a month, and the answer is the same every time. That is the moment a public place pays for itself.
Do not start because a community is a project someone should own. This one is small on purpose. Your support team answers in it, and that is the whole job.
Teams often ask about a customer community versus a help center. A help center holds what you decided to write. A community holds what customers decided to ask.
Two shapes
A support community, and a community operating system
Both are real products and both are bought by real teams. This one is the first shape. Read the columns and pick the one you actually need.
| A support community | A community operating system | |
|---|---|---|
| What it holds | Questions and the answers to them | Spaces, events, courses, feeds, and member profiles |
| Who posts | Customers with a problem, and your support team | Members, moderators, and a community team |
| The unit of content | One question with one accepted answer | Posts, threads, events, and lessons |
| Who runs it daily | The support team, in minutes a day | Usually a community manager |
| What good looks like | The same question gets answered once | Members come back often and stay |
| Setup | About five minutes | Configuration, roles, and a launch plan |
| Pricing shape | $9 one time, or $99 a month on your domain | Commonly per seat or per member, often quote based |
The right column describes a category, not one vendor. If that is the shape you need, buy that shape.
The unit
A question with one accepted answer
A customer asks in public. Other customers reply, your team replies, and votes show which questions many people share.
The asker or your staff marks the reply that worked, and it pins under the question. The thread turns to solved and becomes a page anyone can find later.
Those are all the parts of a branded customer community here. Nothing else to learn, and nothing else to configure.
What a customer community needs
The parts you would otherwise shop for
Moderation
A staff toolbar on every question, plus a dashboard list with bulk actions.
Member management
Every registered customer, searchable, with suspend and reactivate.
GDPR erasure
Erase a member as a self-serve action, with no engineering ticket.
Audit log
An append-only record of every staff and admin action that changes something.
Private questions
Any question can be private, and a whole category can start private.
Flat pricing
The price does not move with seats, page views, members, or questions.
Members
The people in it, on one page
Search every registered member, page through them, and suspend an account that is causing trouble. Reactivate it when the matter is settled.
When someone asks to be erased, that is a button, not a project. The audit log keeps the record of who did it.
Members sign in with a magic link, a 6-digit code, or Google. There are no passwords to reset and no account wall in front of a reader.
- Search and page through every registered member
- Suspend an account, then reactivate it later
- Erase a member and their content for a GDPR request
Moderation
Clean-up takes minutes, not an afternoon
Filter the questions list by open, solved, closed, or private. Select what needs to go and act on all of it at once.
Close, pin, make private, accept a solution, or delete. The same actions sit inline on the thread for staff.
What you will not find here
No spaces, events, courses, member feeds, or points and levels. This is a community platform for customer support, and the support job is the whole scope.
No threaded replies. The stream is flat and in order, with an "in reply to" marker, because that stays readable for non-technical customers.
No importer. Old community threads cannot be moved in, so teams start fresh and let the new questions build the archive.
Pricing
The price of a customer community for SaaS, in two lines
No seat count to forecast, no member tier to outgrow, and no quote to chase.
Basic
$9 one-time
Create your portal- Portal on yourcompany.myforumcat.com
- 2 team seats
- 1,000 registered members
- 10,000 questions
- 1 GB (≈2,000 images) of media
- Full SEO and GEO: structured data + sitemap
- Analytics built in
most popular
Pro
$99 per month
Start with ProEverything in Basic, plus
- Your own custom domain
- Unlimited team seats
- 10,000 registered members
- Unlimited questions
- 50 GB (≈100,000 images) of media
- 1,000,000 page views / month
FAQ
Fair questions
Do we need a community manager to run it?
Answer
No. The people who already answer customer email can answer here instead. It is the same work, written once, in public.
Can members message each other, or join groups?
Answer
No. There are no private messages, groups, events, or courses. Members ask, answer, and vote on public questions.
Who can see a private question?
Answer
Only the person who asked it and your team. Whole categories can be private too, so every question posted there starts private.
Can we import our old forum or help docs?
Answer
Not today. There is no importer. Most teams start fresh and let the new questions build the archive, which is live in minutes.
Can our whole support team answer?
Answer
Yes. Invite teammates as owner, admin, agent, or finance. Basic includes 2 seats and Pro is unlimited (fair use). Staff replies show the person's role.
What happens to our answers if we leave?
Answer
They are yours. Every question and answer is readable through the REST API, so you can pull it all out any time.
Where next
Support forumThe same portal for teams who want Pro on their own domain.Customer community platformsThe wider shelf, and who each option is really for.Community help centerThe same answers, framed as the help center beside your docs.Support portalYour logo, your domain, and pages customers read without an account.
Start small, and let the questions decide the rest
One category and one honest answer is a real start. Forumcat keeps up as it grows.
Create your portalFree for 7 days. No credit card. Live in about five minutes.
