Feedback: Undocumented 1-User Limit in Self-Hosted Version Causes Major Setup Issues

[just-very-queer]

Hello,

First, thank you for your work on this project. I have just completed a self-hosted installation on a cloud server using the official docker-compose.yml and deploy.env files.

I encountered a significant issue that took a very long time to debug: only the initial admin user can log in.

The Problem:
After a successful deployment, I logged into the admin console at /console and created a new, non-admin user. When I tried to log in as this new user, the login would fail.

The gotrue service logs showed a successful authentication (status: 200).

However, the appflowy_cloud service logs showed a User not found error.

The Root Cause:
After many hours of troubleshooting, I finally discovered these lines in the appflowy_cloud startup log:

No license data found for host: [your domain]
Free plan limits - max_users: 1, max_guests: 3
This hard-coded 1-user limit is the reason the second user's login fails. The main application refuses to create a profile for them because the user limit has been reached.

Suggestion for Improvement:
This 1-user limit is a critical piece of information, but it is not mentioned anywhere in the main README.md self-hosting guide or the deploy.env template file. This led to an incredibly frustrating installation experience, as I spent a long time debugging what I thought was a server or configuration error on my side.

To prevent this frustration for future users, could you please add a clear and prominent note about this 1-user limit to the self-hosting documentation? A comment in the deploy.env file would be extremely helpful as well.

Thank you for your consideration.

[annieappflowy]

the self-hosted admin and the user can be two different emails. we will check and improve the documentation per your feedback. thank you!