The bill for running Nebula Control comes out to roughly $145 a month. This is the full production stack for supporting 500-750 active players. You may think an MMO requires serious infrastructure and a large budget, but starting out the cost is quite reasonable.
I am running everything off of DigitalOcean's Kubernetes stack. It is not the cheapest, but I am very familiar with it and it is reliable. Here are the costs, broken down into each part I need:
| Service | Purpose | Cost |
|---|---|---|
| Kubernetes worker nodes, 2x s-2vcpu-4gb | The game compute and redundancy | $48/mo |
| Managed MySQL, HA with a primary and standby | Game data storage and redundancy | $60/mo |
| Managed Valkey, single node | Realtime storage | $15/mo |
| Container registry | Storage for all server images, a necessary evil | $20/mo |
| Kubernetes control plane | Controls the game cluster, free on DigitalOcean | $0/mo |
| Cloudflare DNS, TLS, tunnel, and DDoS protection | The technical front door to my servers | $0/mo |
| Grafana Cloud monitoring | System monitoring with a generous free tier | $0/mo |
| PostHog analytics | Analytic reporting for how players are using the game | $0/mo |
| Resend email | For sending out emails, free tier gives 3,000/month | $0/mo |
| Arachnid CSAM scanning | Legal requirement to scan all uploaded images for CSAM | $0/mo |
| Sightengine | Image scanning tool to detect NSFW images with a decent free tier | $0/mo |
For the initial launch a lot of services have free tiers that keep the cost down. As the game grows I can increase the spend on these $0 line items without changing how anything runs.
There are other bills that don't appear monthly but do impact the cost of running this game. Setting up a business, accounting, and taxes are all real costs too. I also need to hire an artist to create all of the in-game assets I need as well as a lawyer for everything legal. These haven't been priced out yet but when they are each will easily run into the thousands. The biggest cost is my time, which is difficult to put a real number on. Hundreds of hours put into developing this, all for $0, at least until the game is a success.
What does this look like for the break-even math? Well, a season's subscription is $12. After Stripe takes its cut, that works out to slightly less than $2 a month per player. Which is why I have targeted about 80 players on seasonal servers as what I need to cover the game's expenses.
The point of talking about this is to show that running a game like this doesn't have to be expensive. An 80-player goal is achievable and means I can keep the game running without adding microtransactions or relying on whales. A subscription-only MMO is possible at this scale.