Why Almost Everything in AlphaCloud Stays Free

There is a question that reaches us regularly, usually phrased with suspicion: what exactly is the catch in moderation, tickets, verification, giveaways and all the rest working without payment?

Short answer: there is none. The long answer is more interesting, because it explains why this decision is not even particularly selfless on our part.

What the alternative would be

The usual path for Discord bots is to build a feature and then cut it in half. Tickets are free, but only one category. Automod runs, but only with three rules. Logging works, but shows half the events.

Anyone who has built a server knows the result: you set something up, it runs for a week, and then you hit a limit that is not technical but was inserted so that you would pay. That is legitimate as a business model. It just has two side effects we did not want.

First, it makes the product worse exactly where it hurts most. A moderation system that stops at five rules does not protect a server during a raid. Finding out at that moment that the decisive feature sits behind a paywall is not a sales argument, it is damage.

Second, it systematically hits the wrong people. Servers with money are usually servers that are already large. The servers that need moderation tools most urgently are often the ones growing fast, run by someone who is 16 and cannot take out a subscription.

What we sell instead

Premium with us moves limits, it does not unlock a basic function. Concretely, three things:

Branding. Without Premium there is a line with our name under the bot's messages. With Premium you write whatever you want there. Honestly, that is the core of the business: servers large enough to care about their own presentation pay for us not to be in it.

Higher limits. More ticket categories, more stats channels, more of almost everything. The free limits are set so a normal server does not reach them. Anyone who does is usually a server for which a few euros a month is not a question.

AI support in tickets. That is the only exclusive feature, for a mundane reason: every answer costs us real money at a provider. That cannot be scaled for free.

Exactly what sits where is in Free and Premium.

That this works out is not an accident

The maths works because free servers are not only a cost. They are the reason the bot is on so many servers at all, and some of them eventually grow into a subscription. A server that ran our tickets for free for two years and is then big enough to be bothered by our footer is a better customer than somebody we would have billed after a week.

On top of that there are ads on the websites, and for servers that could pay but would rather not, there are ways to earn Premium time: watch ads, refer other servers, or collect Login Coins daily. That is not a marketing trick, it is the same idea carried through.

Where the line is

So this does not sound like a promise we cannot keep: free does not mean everything stays unchanged forever. If a feature costs money at a third party per call, the way the AI does, it cannot live in the free tier. Anything that only needs compute on our own servers can.

That is the actual rule behind it, and it is duller than any marketing statement: we do not lock away anything that does not cost us per use.

What Premium costs and what it includes is on the pricing page.