What the studio has made.
The people who backed us.
Six people have supported the studio so far. Names go up here only if they ask. If one of these is you, here's how to claim your spot.
- 1your name here, if you'd like
- 2your name here, if you'd like
- 3your name here, if you'd like
- 4your name here, if you'd like
- 5your name here, if you'd like
- 6your name here, if you'd like
Get on the board.
Every game stays free either way. Support pays for servers, AI and the people building these games.
- GitHub API: commits on each repo's default branch, merged pull requests, and version tags, summed over the 13 game repos and 5 studio repos (site, play portal, lore, services, mailing list). Many repos are private, so they're counted but not named. GitHub releases aren't used, so tagged versions undercount what shipped.
- Posts in this site's devlog.
- Our own analytics (Umami): sessions on the games and this site, school sites excluded. One person playing several games counts more than once, and our automated playtesters may be included.
- Support: Stripe live API, successful charges, refunds $0, three founder test payments excluded. Patreon isn't included.
$1,111.65 a month.
So far, support ($398.92 after Stripe's fees) covers about a week and a half of this. It's early, and we said we'd show you.
| Cost | Per month |
|---|---|
| ServersRented at Hetzner: games, AI, builds, backups. The school's video server is left out. | $311.80 |
| AI computeBilled per use, 1–24 October: the games' shared key, our coding agents, art generation. | $599.85 |
| Claude CodeFlat subscription that most of the building runs through. $1,400 since April. | $200.00 |
| Total | $1,111.65 |
Biggest to smallest
Our coding agents were paused on 20 October, so the rest of October's AI will look different. We'll post the real figure, not a guess.
Server breakdown
| Server | Per month |
|---|---|
| Game serverThe games, this site, the mailing list | $34.99 |
| AI inference servers ×2Open models on our own machines | $96.98 |
| Build & test server (CI) | $34.99 |
| Shared studio + school serverMonitoring, error tracking, school apps | $48.49 |
| Backups of the shared server | $9.70 |
| Storage volumes, 1 TB | $76.70 |
| Snapshots, 349 GB | $6.95 |
| Public IPv4 addresses ×5 | $3.00 |
| Total | $311.80 |
The account is shared with The Multiverse School, our parent organization. Shared servers are counted in full rather than carved into a smaller games-only slice.
AI breakdown
| 1–24 October | Billed |
|---|---|
| The games' shared keyPrecursors, Raising Intelligences and our automated Precursors watcher. Billed as one key, so it can't be split by game. | $235.46 |
| AI coding agentsQwen models writing and testing code, 1–20 October. $241.56 of it built Precursors. | $363.80 |
| Art generation (DeepInfra) | $0.59 |
| Total | $599.85 |
September: coding agents $289.04 from 17 September ($114.14 on Precursors); DeepInfra $0.00. There's no September figure for the games' key: the provider only reports a key's lifetime and current month. It spent $224.13 before October, going back to at least July.
Lifetime on our OpenRouter account, as of 24 October: $2,049.00 used of $2,055.00 bought since March. That's the coding agents ($652.84, 17 Sep – 20 Oct), the games' key ($459.59), the school's AI ($121.14; $28.81 this month, not counted as ours) and $815.43 on keys we've since deleted, which the provider won't attribute to a project. The agents' key itself read $681 on 20 October, $28 more than the run log, which misses a few runs.
$2.15 of AI thinking, given away.
Raw compute for Precursors players who didn't pay, 10–24 October: 10,787 calls. It's the only game that meters AI per player so far.
The detail
| Precursors, 10–24 Oct | Calls | Raw cost |
|---|---|---|
| Free allowance of advanced minds | 2,862 | $1.85 |
| Small minds (always free) | 7,925 | $0.30 |
| Bug-report credit awards | 0 | $0.00 |
| Total | 10,787 | $2.15 |
Raw cost is logged tokens × the provider's list price, not the invoice. The games' key is shared, so its bill can't isolate players. Every metered Precursors call in October, ours and test accounts included, is $8.23 at list price, against $235.46 billed to the key, so most of that bill isn't players. Founder and test accounts are excluded; our own anonymous playtest bots may be included.
If you'd like to help.
Every game stays free either way. Support pays for servers, AI and the people building these games.