How much does it cost?

Most communities pay $4 to $8 a month for their server. Backups are free for most communities.

Only people with Sblurp open count. A community of 5,000 members usually has far fewer people online at the same time. A bigger server than 2 CPUs does not hold many more people.

Examples of the smallest server are a Fly.io shared-cpu-1x machine with 512 MB and a 1 GB volume ($3.89), or a DigitalOcean Basic droplet with 512 MiB ($4). Backups to Cloudflare R2 cost $0 while you store less than 10 GB. See Backups.

Your community's data lives wherever you put your Sblurp server. We do not market Sblurp to the EU in particular, but we must point this out: if you put your server in the EU, all data except accounts lives there, and only there. Accounts stay on sblurp.chat in the United States. See Your data.

Monthly prices

Prices were read from the provider pages on 2026-10-16. OVHcloud prices were read on 2026-10-18. They are in USD, for a month of 730 hours, without tax. Prices change, so look at the provider page before you buy.

What the prices include:

• Fly.io: add a volume for the data at $0.15 per GB per month. A 1 GB volume holds about a million messages. A shared IPv4 address and TLS certificates are free. Fly.io manages the operating system for you. See Fly.io.
• DigitalOcean: the price includes a 10 GiB disk, an IPv4 address and at least 500 GiB of traffic. You install Docker and keep the operating system up to date. See Any VPS.
• Hetzner: the CPX02 price includes IPv4. For the other sizes, add about $0.60 for IPv4. In the US, the smallest size is CPX11 (2 vCPU / 2 GB) at $20.49.
• OVHcloud: the price includes an IPv4 address, an NVMe disk (40 GB on VPS-1), a daily backup and unlimited traffic. These are the prices with no commitment for a US account. With a 12-month commitment, VPS-1 is $4.54. In the EU, VPS-1 is €4.49 and VPS-2 is €8.49. The same plans are sold in US and EU data centers. See Any VPS.
• AWS Lightsail: the price includes the disk, an IPv4 address and at least 1 TB of traffic. Its CPUs are burstable.

Use a hosting company with a persistent disk: Render or Railway with a disk, Fly.io with a volume, or a VPS. Most other managed container services, for example Cloud Run, App Runner and Azure Container Apps, have no disk that keeps SQLite safe, or they close long connections after a few minutes.

Storage

The server stores about 757 MB per million messages, plus uploaded files. Cloudflare R2 backups cost $0 while you store less than 10 GB, so most communities stay in the free tier for years.

Server sizes

"People online" means people who have Sblurp open at the same time. "Stays fast" means messages arrive in under half a second, even when the chat is busy. Measured on 2026-10-17.

Memory is never what runs out first, so you do not need to pay for more memory. A launch day, when many people join at once, needs more than a normal day.

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