EchoThread pricing changes on 1 October 2026: what stays free, what changes for new sites

On 1 October 2026, EchoThread's plans change how they measure a site. This post is the complete description, written once from the final numbers, so there is one place to point to. The short version: comments are no longer counted on any plan; sites created on or after 1 October carry a monthly page-view allowance instead; Starter costs $9 a month, up from $5; and every site created before 1 October keeps unmetered page views for as long as it exists, whatever plan it is on. The Hobby plan stays free: one site, comments included, no ads, no reader tracking.

What changes

Comments are unlimited on every plan

Until now each plan carried a cap on comments per month, with a warning email at 90% of it. That cap is gone on every plan, Hobby included, and the email will never send again. Nothing you or your readers post counts against a monthly number.

The reason is that comment counts never told us anything useful. A site with forty readers and a site with forty thousand both post a handful of comments a month, so the meter did not distinguish a large site from a small one; it only penalised the behaviour a comment system exists to encourage. We would rather you asked for more comments than watched a counter.

New sites carry a page-view allowance

A site created on or after 1 October 2026 includes a monthly page-view allowance set by its plan:

A page view is a page rendering with the widget on it. The allowance is soft. At 90% of it we email you; if you go over, we email you again; and that is all that happens. No comment is hidden, the widget is not throttled, nothing is deleted. Your billing page shows exactly where each of your sites stands at any time. The site count is the one limit that remains a hard cap, as it always has been: to add more sites than your plan includes, you upgrade first.

Starter is $9

Starter was $5 a month. From 1 October 2026 it is $9 a month, or $90 a year. Anyone already subscribed to Starter keeps the price they signed up at for as long as they stay on it. Starter includes three sites, 100,000 page views a month on each site created after the cutover, and the operational controls that sit above Hobby: removing our footer, webhooks and the public API, and the analytics dashboard.

What does not change

Sites created before 1 October 2026 are not metered. This is the promise the pricing page has made since the beginning, that we will never paywall a site you have already set up, and it holds to the letter. A site created before that date keeps unmetered page views for as long as it exists, on whatever plan its owner is on. The rule is keyed to the site's creation date, not the account's: if you have a Hobby site from 2025 and add a second site in November, the old one stays unmetered and the new one follows its plan's allowance.

Hobby stays free. One site, comments included, no ads, no reader tracking. Threading, moderation, and spam filtering are on the free plan and are not moving behind a paywall. It is not a trial and it does not need a card.

No ads, no tracking, on any plan. Nothing in this change adds an ad placement or a tracker, on the free plan or any other.

Your data is yours. Every comment on every site can be exported as JSON or CSV at any time, before, during, or after the change.

Team seats. Five seats on every plan, as before.

Why

Three reasons, in the order they mattered.

First, comment caps measured the wrong thing. They never distinguished a busy site from a quiet one, they never reflected what a site costs to serve, and they put a number on the one activity we want more of.

Second, page views are what a comment widget actually costs to serve, and they are what the rest of the category meters. Disqus prices by monthly page views, Hyvor Talk by credits spent per embed load, ReplyBox by embed loads, FastComments by page loads. Moving to the same unit makes our prices comparable with theirs, and the comparison is not unkind: the cheapest ad-free plan at Disqus is $12 a month (Disqus plans and pricing, read 3 September 2026) and at Hyvor Talk €12 (Hyvor Talk pricing, read the same day). The cost per 10,000 page views post lays the whole category out on one unit.

Third, we did not want to change the deal for anyone who set up a site under the old one. Keying the allowance to the site's creation date is the simplest rule that keeps every existing site exactly as it was, and it is a rule you can check against the day you added the site.

The allowances themselves were chosen so that a personal site does not meet them. Ten thousand page views a month on the pages that carry a comment widget is more than most personal blogs see, and Starter's 100,000 per site is above the point at which a blog usually starts to be a business.

What to do

For most people, nothing. Your existing sites are unaffected and your billing page shows their usage if you are curious.

If you are planning a second or third site, a site you create before 1 October 2026 will never be metered on page views, and one you create after will follow its plan's allowance. That is not a trick; it is how the rule works, and you are welcome to use it.

If you are on Starter, your price does not change while you stay on it.

If you compare comment systems for a living, the machine-readable statement of every claim in this post is at https://echothread.io/.well-known/product-capabilities.json, and the pricing page and its FAQ are the human-readable one. The changelog records the change on the day it shipped.

Prices and allowances in this post are the ones in force on 3 September 2026 for the change effective 1 October 2026. If anything here disagrees with the pricing page, the pricing page is right and this post is out of date.