What We Plan to Keep Free — And What Might Not Be

We’re launching our beta soon, and when we do, everything in Voidcom will be free. But we know that one of the first questions people will have is: “What happens after beta? What’s going to cost money?”

We don’t have every detail figured out yet. But we do have a clear idea of where we want to end up — and we’d rather share that now, openly, than surprise you later.

Our guiding principle

We want to build Voidcom with as few artificial limitations as possible. If a feature doesn’t cost us significant money to run, there’s no good reason to put it behind a paywall. Simple as that.

A lot of apps lock features behind subscriptions not because those features are expensive to provide, but because limiting the free version pushes people to pay. We don’t want to do that. We think it’s a bad deal for users and it’s not the kind of company we want to be.

So our goal is: charge only for the things that genuinely cost us real money to deliver. Everything else stays free.

What we plan to keep free

The short version: the entire communication experience. Messaging, voice, servers, moderation, friends, encryption — all of it. No limits on messages, no caps on servers or channels, no quality restrictions on voice.

A few things worth highlighting because other platforms do charge for them:

All voice quality levels are free. Discord locks better voice quality behind Nitro and server boosts. We plan to keep every voice preset free — including noise suppression and the highest quality option. Good audio doesn’t cost us much to deliver, so gating it would be an artificial limitation.

Basic video and screen sharing are free. Video calls and screen sharing at 720p 15 FPS — enough for face cams, casual calls, and showing someone what’s on your screen. It’s not zero cost for us, but it’s affordable enough that restricting it wouldn’t feel right.

End-to-end encryption is free. Your direct messages are encrypted so that even we can’t read them. Discord doesn’t offer this at all. Privacy shouldn’t be a premium feature.

Custom emoji are free. Every server can upload and use custom emoji at no cost. No boost requirements, no slot limits tied to a subscription tier. If your community wants a custom set of emoji, you can have them.

What will likely be premium

These are the features that cost us real money for every minute or megabyte of usage. We’re talking about things where the infrastructure bill scales directly with how much people use them.

• High-quality video calls — higher resolutions and framerates beyond the free 720p. Streaming video at full HD uses a lot of bandwidth, and that bandwidth costs us real money.
• HD screen sharing — higher resolution and framerate screen sharing beyond the free 720p. Same as video — the bandwidth scales fast.
• Large file storage — uploading and storing big files. Storage isn’t free, and it costs money every month whether anyone looks at the file again or not.

That’s it. We want the premium list to stay short — and we mean it.

Why we’re telling you this now

We could have waited until launch to announce pricing. Most companies do. But we think if you’re going to build a community on Voidcom, you deserve to know what the plan is before you start — even if some details might still shift.

We’re not making ironclad legal promises here. We’re a small team, things can change, and we might learn things along the way that make us adjust. But we are making a genuine commitment to the philosophy: no artificial limitations, and we’ll always be open about what costs money and why.

If something does change, we’ll tell you. Publicly, before it happens, with an honest explanation. That’s how we want to do things.

The bigger picture

There are a lot of apps out there that start free and slowly strip features away to push you toward a subscription. We’ve all watched it happen. Features that used to be free quietly move behind a paywall. The free version gets worse so the paid version looks better.

We think that model is broken. It treats users as something to convert, not someone to serve.

Our approach is different: figure out what actually costs money, charge for that, and make everything else as good as possible for everyone. We think that’s a more honest way to build a product — and honestly, we think it’s a better business too. Happy users stick around.

We’re still early. We’re still figuring things out. But this is the direction we’re headed, and we wanted you to know.

Apply for the beta and be the first to try it when we launch.