I am planning to build a small community and i really want to start offf small. Currently if i try to install discourse it tells me that the minimum plan i have to be on is $20 per month which is too high as i am not even sure if the community will take off as expected. I would really like to use discourse at $5 plan. Is that possible? if not $5 is $10 droplet plan possible?
It will be fine for text and voice between maybe 2 people, You really need to test and find out. The problem is voice services and anything doing live transcoding can be CPU heavy and most likely why they are recommending 2 CPU cores (2 cores are on the $20 droplets).
I was reading conversion on the official blog of Discourse and it was commented there:
"The only time you typically need swap is during the /admin/docker upgrade process. And Sam's recent Sidekiq upgrades free up about 7% more memory on top of this.
1GB is a 100% officially supported install now, the swap file is just a bit of insurance! "
I think it will be safe to use $10 droplet.