From the moment you create your space, it is always available and free for up to 25 concurrent users. If you are looking to just hang out with your friends and chat, you are probably good on our free account. If you are looking to run a bigger event, you can test and experiment for free until you are ready to book a reservation for your event.
Premium reservations can be booked through the Premium Dashboard associated with each particular space. Our pricing is a factor of three things: how many people you want to have *concurrently* in the space (User capacity), how long your event lasts (Duration), and how many objects are in your space. You can find out more on our pricing page here. If you want to see how many objects are in your map or you are ready to schedule and pay for your event, you can do that on your Premium Dashboard.
All Premium Reservations are based on the highest expected user capacity as well as the duration and pricing tier (Town/City/Metropolis). Since all premium reservations set aside dedicated server capacity to increase reliability for your event on our Premium Servers, you do pay for all of the anticipated server space that will be used, not just the number of users over the basic tier's 25 free users.
Spaces on our free servers all share server space and, as a result, you may encounter lower reliability on our free servers as opposed to our Premium Servers.
If you expected 30 users (peak number of users expected at any given time) for a 2-hour event on the Premium Upgraded Town Tier, the cost would be calculated as follows:
Town pricing ($1 per 2 hrs per user) X 30 users = $30 total.
Since 2-hours is the smallest time-increment available, 1-hour events will be at the same rate as 2-hours events. Similarly, a 3-hour event would have the same price as a 4-hour event.
All newly created spaces are automatically added to our Free Servers. When you make a reservation for a special event or subscribe to a monthly plan, your Space will be moved to one of our Premium servers for the duration of your reservation or subscription. After the event or the end of your subscription period, your Space will be moved back to our Free Servers.
Our goal was to make as much of our platform available on our free spaces as we could. A few benefits to premium spaces are increased capacity (spaces for more than 25 concurrent users), guaranteed reliability, and more customized security options.
You can learn all about setting up a reservation on your Space's Premium Dashboard by clicking here.
We do not do flexible pricing right now (pay afterwards depending on how many people show up) because we don't want to give people surprise bills, and because we need to know how much server space allocate beforehand. Having the appropriate user capacity reserved on our Premium Servers will provide you and your guests with the smoothest experience during your event.
We recommend you make a conservative estimate on how many people show up. You can also increase the capacity of your reservation, even during the event, but it will take up to 10 minutes for our system to process.