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.
Flamewars is currently in pre-release so there are no published packages. When there are, the full setup takes just a couple of minutes.
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.
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