Flamewars is a serverless comment engine. You self-host an instance in AWS. It's designed for websites which run without their own server, like a statically generated website (Hugo, Jekyll) served on GitHub Pages. You can install it in just a few minutes.
Comments support markdown, including lists, code blocks and images.
A serverless architecture allows you to pay only for what you use. For a small or medium-sized blog with a relatively low number of visitors, that's likely to be much more cost-effective than a subscription and can even be free.
💿 Installation
Flamewars is currently in pre-release so there are no published packages. When there are, the full setup takes just a couple of minutes.
💵 Cost
Most services are available on the AWS free tier, meaning that for any reasonable usage you won't pay anything for them.
- API Gateway
- DynamoDB - free tier (always free up to 25GB, 200M requests per month)
- Lambda - free tier (always free up to 1M invocations per month)
- S3 - few cents per GB, code uses less than 1MB. Free for the first year
- CloudFormation - free
Although some of the services here are not on the free tier, AWS will waive charges below a certain value as it's not worth them collecting such small amounts. If your bill totals a few cents then you will pay nothing at all.
It is always worth setting billing alarms and budgets to ensure you don't run into any nasty surprises.
🌐 Alternatives
Here are some alternative projects which may work for you. For various reasons, I preferred not to use them.
- Disqus: ad-supported or fixed monthly subscription
- Commento: subscription, or requires a server running 24/7
- Utterances: commenters require GitHub and must authorize the app
- Lambda Comments: not maintained, lacks features, difficult installation
- ISSO: requires a server