After spending a lot of time researching into different community platforms. Comparing features, benefits, prices etc. I decided that nothing really stood out to be able to do exactly what I dreamed SDL could do and be.

In the end I found and bought a Ghost CMS template which handles the web part, researched and found Beehiiv which can handle emails and Discord can handle the community messaging part for now. This could change in future but this set up seems better than every other option for now (Circle.so could be an option but is $99pm which isn't an option at this stage - in future this could be an option if it is useful & there is a need)