Pricing
You pay for throughput, or for hosting. Never for features.
Every feature described anywhere on this site is available on the free tier. The paid axes raise eight numbers and, separately, put the bot on hardware that is only yours.
Self-hosting is free and always will be. Clone the repository, run it, and
none of this page applies to you: billing is off, the payment credentials are never read,
and your caps are whatever you set in your own .env. There is no licence key
and no feature gate.
Axis A — throughput
Eight caps, listed in full. The two preset tiers raise all of them at a fixed annual price. The custom option lets you set each one yourself and prices it live on the dashboard before you reach a checkout.
| Cap | Free | Tier 1 | Tier 2 | Custom ceiling |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Submissions per day | 100 | 500 | 2,000 | 10,000 |
| Tickets per day | 50 | 250 | 1,000 | 5,000 |
| Giveaway entries per day | 500 | 2,500 | 10,000 | 50,000 |
| Dashboard API requests per minute | 60 | 180 | 600 | 2,000 |
| Forms per server | 5 | 20 | 50 | 300 |
| Panels per server | 5 | 20 | 50 | 300 |
| Roles per rule type | 3 | 10 | 25 | 100 |
| History retention (days) | 30 | 180 | 730 | 1,825 |
| Price | $0 | $60/year | $180/year | up to $1,295.21/year |
| Monthly equivalent | — | $5.00 | $15.00 | up to $107.93 |
History retention is enforced, not just charged for: a scheduled purge deletes reviewed submissions older than your retention window. Pending submissions are never purged — one of those is live work sitting in someone’s review queue, and ageing it out would silently drop an application the applicant is still waiting on.
Setting your own caps
Each cap is priced per unit above the free baseline, annually. These rates are constants in
pricing.ts, so the dashboard quote, the charge, and this table all come from the
same arithmetic.
| Cap | Free baseline | Per year, per unit above it |
|---|---|---|
| Submissions per day | 100 | $0.05 |
| Tickets per day | 50 | $0.05 |
| Giveaway entries per day | 500 | $0.25 per 100 |
| Dashboard API requests per minute | 60 | $0.09 |
| Forms per server | 5 | $0.33 |
| Panels per server | 5 | $0.33 |
| Roles per rule type | 3 | $0.43 |
| History retention (days) | 30 | $0.01 |
Worked example, because a per-unit table is not a price until someone does the multiplication. A server wanting 1,000 submissions a day and nothing else changed is 900 units above the baseline of 100, at $0.05 each: $45 a year. Adding 90 days of retention on top of the free 30 is 90 more units at a cent each: 90¢, for $45.90 in total. Tier 1 tops out at 500 submissions a day so it will not cover that server at all, and tier 2 — the only preset that does — is $180. Raising the one cap that binds is the cheaper answer by a wide margin, which is the entire reason the builder exists.
It is worth being explicit about the other direction too: buying a preset’s exact caps through the builder always costs at least what the preset costs, because presets are a bundle discount. Tier 1’s caps price out at $60.21 against $60, and tier 2’s at $261.01 against $180. Use the builder when one or two caps bind and the rest do not; take the preset when most of them move together. The dashboard shows both numbers side by side rather than making you work that out.
There is no unlimited tier, anywhere, and there will not be one. Every cap has a ceiling, custom values included — the right-hand column of the first table. An unbounded cap removes the ability to reason about worst-case cost and makes abuse free to attempt. A request above a ceiling is refused and names the field, rather than being quietly clamped to something you did not ask for.
A selection totalling less than $5.00 a year is refused at checkout rather than billed. A charge that small is not worth firing on its own once processing fees are counted.
Axis B — hosting
Self-hosting is free. Paying for hosting means a dedicated instance of this same bot, run for you, under your own bot token — priced near cost.
| Option | What it is | Price |
|---|---|---|
| Self-hosted | You run it. Your hardware, your caps, no billing account of any kind. | $0 |
| Shared | The multi-tenant bot everyone else is on. | $0 |
| Dedicated | A dedicated instance under your own bot token, run for you. | $10/year |
The two axes are strictly additive. A server can be on free throughput with a dedicated instance, or on tier 2 with the shared bot, in any combination. There is no bundle discount and none is planned — each axis is priced and charged on its own.
Why the billing is annual
There is no monthly option, anywhere. This is a fee-survival requirement rather than a preference. Card processing runs roughly 2.9% + $0.30 per transaction, and the flat 30 cents is what does the damage at these amounts: twelve small monthly charges pay that flat component twelve times for the same revenue one annual charge collects once.
Concretely, a $5/month tier billed monthly loses roughly 9% of a year’s revenue to fees. The same tier billed as a single $60 charge loses roughly 3%. It gets worse the smaller the amount: the $10/year hosting fee framed as $0.83 a month would lose over a third of its value to the flat fee alone, which is exactly why it is never billed that way.
Every monthly figure on this site is computed from the annual price, floored to the cent, and shown only so you can compare against something quoted monthly elsewhere. It is never a cadence you can select.
How payment works
Tebex is the merchant of record. It sells to the customer, collects the money, and owns sales tax and VAT registration and remittance in the places it sells into. Paid plans are created as annual subscriptions, so a plan that stops being paid for ends rather than continuing indefinitely; a refund returns the server to the free selection.
Refunds are available for 14 days after purchase, no reason needed. Ask through Tebex, since they took the payment. Ending a plan changes your caps back and nothing else — forms, submissions, tickets and settings all stay where they are, so a refund costs you the headroom and none of the work. The full terms are on the Terms of Service page.
Downgrading to the fully free selection is the one plan change that skips checkout entirely, because there is no payment to confirm.
What is not metered
Features. All of them. Dropdown panels, custom accept outcomes, manager delegation, ban appeals, ticket transcripts, ticket ratings, giveaway bonus entries, anti-raid, verification, role menus, sticky messages, quick responses, the full data export and both importers are available on the free tier and always have been.