Your forum's search box has been lying to you. Type "instal" instead of "install" and it shrugs. Search for a topic you know was discussed last month and get a wall of barely-related posts, sorted by nothing in particular. That's not your forum's fault — it's the default database text-match that most forums ship with, and everyone has quietly learned to work around it by scrolling instead of searching.
The Flarum community solved this years ago: connect your forum to a real search engine and search becomes instant, typo-tolerant, and ranked by relevance. There's just one catch — every extension that does it expects you to run the search server. Install it, secure it, back it up, upgrade it, and keep it running next to your forum forever.
Forage is that fix, without the server.
What you get
- Typo tolerance — "serach", "flarrum", "instal" all find what your member meant.
- Instant results — matches appear as they type, prefix-matched and ranked.
- Real relevance — titles weigh more than body text, exact beats partial, the best answer surfaces first.
- A dedicated search server — not a shared index. Yours, isolated, run and maintained by us.
Setup is the same one-key routine as our other services: install the free open-source extension, paste one key from your dashboard, and your forum indexes itself. Minutes, not evenings. Built deliberately for forum owners with no server experience.
Pricing
Tiers are by indexed posts — the honest measure of a forum's search footprint. Searches are unlimited on every tier; we never meter queries.
- Starter — $49/year — up to 50,000 posts
- Growth — $99/year — up to 250,000 posts
- Max — $179/year — up to 1,000,000 posts
For comparison: hosted search elsewhere starts around $30 a month. Forage starts at $49 a year, and it's purpose-built for Flarum rather than adapted to it.
The honest part
Two things worth knowing, because we'd rather say them than have you find out:
Your data stays yours. The search index is a derived copy of your posts — your forum's database remains the only source of truth. Cancel, and the index is deleted from our infrastructure entirely — nothing lingers. If you come back, reconnecting your forum re-fills it from your own database.
If your forum is small, you may not need us yet. A few thousand posts search tolerably with the default. Forage earns its keep as your archive grows and members start saying "I know it was discussed somewhere…" — that's the moment to come back.
Forage works with any Flarum 2.x forum.
