Hobby is a full comment system, free forever — threading, moderation, and spam filtering are never paywalled. Starter and above add reader polls, star ratings and Bluesky and Mastodon replies — plus operational controls: webhooks, the public API, an analytics dashboard, and removing our footer.
Comments are unlimited on every paid plan. Hobby includes 5,000 page views and 50 approved comments a month: we email you at 90% and again if you go over, and the first month over is a grace month. A second month over in a row pauses new comments until the month resets or you upgrade — existing comments always stay visible. Hobby accounts created before 18 October 2026 keep unlimited comments, and every site created before 1 October 2026 keeps unmetered page views. On paid plans page views are a soft allowance and nothing breaks. The site count is a hard cap; upgrade to add more sites.
SSO, on Pro and above, is shared-secret: your own backend HMAC-signs a small identity payload and hands it to the widget, so a visitor lands signed in as themselves with no separate EchoThread login. It is not an OIDC or SAML integration — there is no identity-provider connection to configure.
Every paid plan includes 5 team seats — invite teammates at no extra cost. Hobby includes the owner only (Hobby accounts created before 18 October 2026 keep their 5 seats). What Pro and above add is the ability to restrict a seat to a Moderator role that can review and act on comments without touching billing or site settings, instead of every teammate holding full Owner access.
Custom widget subdomain, on Pro and above, gives each site its own hostname on our zone — yoursite.echothread.io instead of the shared api.echothread.io / cdn.echothread.io. You pick the name in your dashboard and it is live immediately: there is no DNS to add, no ownership record to prove, and nothing for our team to activate. It is a hostname on echothread.io, not a domain of your own — we do not serve the widget from a domain you bring.
The owner-side moderation controls are free on every plan, Hobby included. A restricted-words list holds up to 2,000 entries and is checked against the comment body and the commenter's display name before the spam filter runs, so your own rule decides first — you choose whether a match is held for review or rejected outright, and a display-name match is always held rather than rejected. Ban and trust are your standing on one person on one site: a ban stops them posting there and never follows them anywhere else, and trust auto-approves their comments — though never past a word you set to reject outright. Both are yours to undo, and moderators can use them too. Auto-close stops new comments on a thread 30, 60, 90, 180, or 365 days after the discussion started — existing comments stay visible, and turning the setting off reopens the threads.
Business and Enterprise add two operational controls the smaller tiers don't need: an audit log that records who did what on a site — moderation actions (comment approvals, rejections, and deletions), settings changes (site settings, webhooks, and team seat roles), credential actions (personal API token creation and revocation, SSO secret rotation), and entitlement changes — and data retention controls to choose how long comments stick around before automatic deletion: forever (the default on every plan today), 2 years, 1 year, or 90 days.