[lnkmails]

We at StackStorm now do a combination of SAAS Discourse (https://forum.stackstorm.com/) and Slack (~1200 members). Discourse allows newcomers to search for relevant issues and allows us to do async support well. With 3000 members in slack, a paid version would be unimaginable in terms of cost. Plus, even if we pay (which we do for the team itself), the search is unbelievably bad in slack. Discourse seems to be doing well for us so far. We'll know more in a few months now. BTW we also allow people to file bug reports in github. It's a lot of tooling around customer engagement and support but people like that they can hop on slack, get pointed to forum if the question they ask cannot be answered by larger community. Core engineers answer discourse questions and point people to github issues if there is a legit issue. Sometimes people ask support questions straight on github.