FTH4 keeps the FreeToastHost social contract — free for listed clubs, by Toastmasters, two trusted domains — and rebuilds the platform underneath for the next twenty-two years. Here's what's in the box, what's coming next, and what makes it different.
A clean rebuild — not a different platform. Everything that has worked since 2004 is preserved.
If your club is listed on Toastmasters.org, your website is free. No advertising, no paid tier, no premium features behind a paywall. Ever.
Maintained by a volunteer team of Toastmaster developers and Ambassadors, with the cooperation of Toastmasters International.
Clubs stay on {slug}.toastmastersclubs.org; districts stay on {slug}.toastmastersdistricts.org. No URL changes when a club migrates.
Chartered, unchartered, and district sites are all validated against Toastmasters International's records before provisioning — the same gate that has kept FreeToastHost free of squatters since 2004.
FTH4 ships in three waves. The MVP delivers feature parity with FTH3 plus the modern essentials. v1 brings the differentiators clubs have been asking for. v2 is the frontier.
The minimum to migrate a real club from FTH3 and run it day-to-day on FTH4.
Home, meeting info, contact form, calendar (with iCal feed), news, and unlimited custom pages — with starter themes you can re-brand in minutes.
Email-based login (with magic-link and TOTP options), member directory, profile editor, agenda viewer, role sign-up, and the Mentor / Protégé form.
Roster (with bulk import from your Club Central CSV), officer-term tracking, agenda builder, calendar editor, page CMS, file manager, and email composer.
Members, guests, former-members lists with role-based addresses for officers (rotated automatically when terms change), DKIM-signed for deliverability.
Public downloads, member-only files, and folder organisation — all with sane quotas and audit logging.
Point your existing domain at FTH4 with a CNAME; certificates are issued and renewed automatically the first time the new hostname loads.
The differentiators — what clubs have been asking for on the support forum for years.
Per-member view of paths enrolled, level, project, and awards. VP Education gets reports without spreadsheets. Path/project data is sync-able as Toastmasters International updates Pathways.
Speech history per member (title, date, project, evaluator, time recorded). Attendance auto-recorded from agenda role assignments and check-ins, with manual override for the Secretary.
Optional Stripe and PayPal integrations. Members pay their dues online; clubs reconcile against Toastmasters International records. Funds go directly to the club — FTH4 never custodies money.
First-class meeting links via Zoom, Google Meet, and Microsoft Teams. RSVP, calendar invites, and one-click join — for the 25%+ of clubs that now meet online or hybrid.
Multi-club calendar rollup, Distinguished Club Programme tracking, contest management, TLI scheduling, and officer-roster queries across every club in the district.
Native internationalisation with Spanish, French, German, Mandarin, Japanese, Hindi, and Arabic at v1 — not a Google Translate widget.
Installable Progressive Web App for members — offline-cached agendas, push-notification reminders for upcoming role assignments, no app-store gatekeepers.
Read-only at v1 — per-club tokens, scoped access, JSON. So districts can build their own club finders, dashboards, and rollup tools without screen-scraping.
XLSX exports of speech log, role log, attendance log, and dues log — the spreadsheets clubs would otherwise have to build by hand.
The frontier — what we'd like to ship after the v1 differentiators land. Opt-in by design; off by default.
One screen for the Toastmaster: timer, speaker order, online queue, role check-ins, and live voting. Keeps in-room and remote members in lockstep.
Best Speaker / Best Evaluator polls run during the meeting. Vote Counter sees the tally in real time; results published to the agenda automatically.
Agenda theme suggestions from prior meetings. Evaluation rubric helpers. Table-topics generation. Newsletter drafts. All opt-in, provider-pluggable, and off by default.
Suggest mentors for new members based on Pathways progress and goals — the mentor / protégé form, but smarter.
v2 opens the public API to scoped writes and emits webhooks on agenda, attendance, and dues events — for clubs that want to pipe FTH4 into Slack, Discord, or their own dashboards.
Custom blocks, custom pages, custom reports for clubs and districts that want to extend FTH4 — without forking the platform.
A clean rebuild lets us fix things that no incremental update could reach.
Connection pooling at the database layer ends the connection-exhaustion class of outages that takes the whole fleet down at once. Background processes are queued; analytics writes are async. No more synchronous hit-counter slowing every page.
WCAG 2.2 AA on every public page, validated in CI on every pull request. Screen-reader friendly, keyboard navigable, properly contrast-checked. Section 508 compliance is a launch requirement, not a roadmap item.
Server-rendered HTML for every visitor path. JavaScript is a progressive enhancement, not a gate. No third-party CDN single-points-of-failure for icon fonts or CSS frameworks.
Auto-issuing TLS for any custom hostname the first time it hits the server — no DNS poller, no ACME job to fail, no manual renewals. Set the CNAME and you're done.
Hybrid meeting features run on a real-time channel that ships with the framework rather than as a bolt-on. The hybrid console (v2) becomes a small additive feature instead of a separate subsystem.
GDPR-compliant defaults. No third-party trackers on public pages. Per-club privacy policy generation. Member data export and "forget me" workflows from the member portal — not a support-ticket request.
FTH4 is being built in the open, under AGPL-3.0, on GitHub. Any Toastmaster with IT skills — club Webmaster, district technology officer, professional engineer who happens to be a member — can read the code, file issues, suggest features, and submit pull requests.
The contributor docs assume you've never built a Rails app before. One command on a fresh laptop gets you a working local copy in under ten minutes.
FTH4 is in active development today. The demo on this site shows where the platform is going. The free websites under toastmastersclubs.org are not going anywhere — FTH4 is built to inherit them.