Cusdis is deprecated: how to move your comments to a hosted alternative

Cusdis was the answer a lot of static-site owners gave to "what do I use instead of Disqus": open source, roughly 5 KB, anonymous comments with just a nickname and an email, no tracking, and a hosted plan at $12 a year. That answer is over. The maintainer marked the project deprecated and archived the repository on 17 July 2026; it is read-only now, and the README opens with "Cusdis is deprecated now. If you want to export your data. Please email hi@cusdis.com." Publii removed its Cusdis plugin from the marketplace a month later, on 20 August.

If your site runs Cusdis today, nothing has broken yet. The hosted dashboard is still up and the widget still loads. But there will be no fixes, no security releases, and no warning before the hosted service goes away. This post is the move: get the data out first, then pick a replacement that covers what Cusdis did and the things it never did.

First, get your comments out

Cusdis has no self-serve export. Email hi@cusdis.com from the address you signed up with and say which format you want; the README's instructions are to send your signed-up email and a preferred export format. Ask for JSON. Do this before anything else, and do it this week: an archived project's inbox is not a service with an SLA.

If you self-host Cusdis, you own the Postgres database and can dump the comments and pages tables yourself.

What Cusdis got right

Be honest about why you chose it, because the replacement has to match:

• Tiny. About 5 KB gzipped. Most alternatives are heavier; anything that loads an ad network is much heavier.
• No account for readers. Nickname and email, done. That single design choice is why it had comments at all on small blogs.
• No tracking, no ads. The whole reason to leave Disqus.
• Approve by email. A notification with a quick-approve link, so moderation did not mean logging in.
• Cheap. Free for one site and 100 approved comments a month; $12 a year for unlimited.

What Cusdis never had

• No spam filter. The README says it plainly: "There is no spam filter, hence, you will have to manually moderate your comment section and comments won't be displayed until you approve them." Every comment sat in a queue until you clicked. Fine at ten comments a month; not fine once AI-written spam finds your form.
• No reactions, no images, no link previews. Text only.
• One language per site, chosen by the owner.
• No import from Disqus, so people who came from Disqus left their old threads behind.

The replacement should keep the first list and fix the second.

Your options

• Run a fork yourself. Cusdis is GPLv3; you can host the last release on Vercel or Railway indefinitely. You inherit an unmaintained codebase and its dependencies, and you still have no spam filter. Reasonable for a single low-traffic blog owned by someone who enjoys ops.
• giscus or utterances. Free, fast, and every reader needs a GitHub account to comment. If your readers are developers, that is fine; if they are not, comments stop. The giscus alternative post covers this trade-off.
• Commentbox. Hosted, with a free plan capped at 100 comments a month, the same ceiling Cusdis's free tier had.
• A hosted widget with guest comments and a spam filter. This is the category EchoThread is in, so the rest of this post is specific about what that looks like.

Cusdis to EchoThread, feature by feature

Importing the Cusdis export

There is no one-click Cusdis importer, because Cusdis had no standard export format. What EchoThread does have is a generic JSON import: a list of threads, each with the page URL and title, each holding comments with author name, body, creation time and an optional parent for replies. Converting a Cusdis JSON dump to that shape is a short script; the fields map one to one (Cusdis page.slug or page.url to the thread URL, by_nickname to the author, content to the body, parentId to the parent).

1. Create the site in the dashboard with the domain you publish to, and copy the API key.
2. Convert the export to the JSON import shape and import it from the dashboard's Import page. Approved comments stay approved.
3. Replace the Cusdis snippet with EchoThread's.

The Cusdis embed was a div with data-host, data-app-id and data-page-id plus their script. The EchoThread embed is the same shape:

<div id="echothread"
     data-api-key="YOUR_API_KEY"
     data-identifier="SAME_PAGE_ID_YOU_GAVE_CUSDIS"></div>
<script src="https://cdn.echothread.io/widget.js" async></script>

Keep data-identifier equal to whatever you used as Cusdis's data-page-id, and the imported thread lines up with the page it belongs to. Platform-specific versions of that snippet exist for Hugo, Eleventy, Jekyll and Astro; Publii users get an official plugin instead of a snippet.

What it costs

EchoThread's Hobby plan is free for your first site: unlimited comments, no ads, no reader tracking, and 10,000 page views a month on sites created from 1 October 2026 (a site created before that date keeps unmetered page views). Paid plans start at $9 a month for three sites and 100,000 page views; see pricing for the full ladder. A Cusdis Pro user was paying $12 a year; a single personal site on EchoThread pays nothing.

The lesson from the archive

Cusdis did not fail because it was bad. It was a one-person project, and one-person projects end. Whatever you pick next, pick something that can export your comments on demand, so the next move, if there is one, is a file and an afternoon rather than an email to an inbox nobody reads.