Sanguine I really like how this is a community project with an awesome and well moderated positive community, I'm not very good with PHP but I'd like to create a pull request in the near future if I figure out how to do it 😛 I'd love to contribute back something to this awesome community 🙂 I've never really contributed anything to open source rather than donate to a few projects but since I'll be going to university soon that isn't an option at the moment. It's people like you and all the amazing people that contribute to open source projects that inspire me to keep learning! 😃
Seeing how you already have a pretty amazing service I think that, once Flarum comes out of it's beta stages, you should try and switch to a commercial service. This is just a suggestion and you can do whatever you want but here is what I propose:
Keep the free service as it is, managed shared hosting running off donations and a choice out of pre installed plugins.
Have a paid service where for a competitive price, e.g. $10 / month you can install your own managed dedicated Flarum instance. This should be pretty easy with VPS providers such as OVH / VPSag / Hetzner / ... with pretty cheap prices and VPSes more than capable of running Flarum and most offering reseller plans you should be able to create a pretty scalable business where you can offer an interface to manage plugins etc. and still keeping all the instances isolated.
Let me know what you think about that because I think it would be pretty cool to see freeflarum go commercial, although it might need a little name change afterwards 😛
