A free tier that's actually usable for game hosting, and paid plans for the handful of things that genuinely cost us something — default ports, dedicated addresses, and private access to everything else you run. Here's the plan, in the open, before launch.
Why these lines
It's the plan most people should stay on. Here's what sits on which side of the line, and the reason for it.
Minecraft Java clients follow SRV records, and we control the zone those live in. Handing you a port-free address costs us nothing — so charging for it would just be charging because we could.
Bedrock clients ignore SRV. The only way to skip the port number is to hold 19132 on a real IPv4 address, and each address only has one of those. That's scarcity, and it's what the money is for.
On a shared address, someone else's trouble can become your trouble. A dedicated IPv4 is the only honest way to sell separation from that, so it's the only place we'll sell it.
A game relay can check that the first packet is a real handshake. A general one can't — it forwards whatever you point at it, which is exactly what someone running a phishing page wants for free. Putting it behind a paid plan is the cheapest filter that exists, and it keeps the service clean for the people actually using it.
There's no deliberately crippled plan here to make the next one up look better. Every line above exists because it maps to something real on our side.
Waitlist members get access first, and get told directly if any of these numbers change.