How pricing works
AVC is priced by member count, on the pricing page. Prices are shown as a monthly figure with the billed total beside them, and you can pay yearly or monthly. Every feature is available on every tier. Servers under 100 members are free forever, and almost everyone else gets a full free year before anything is charged.
Trials
A server under 100 members never needs to subscribe. Between 100 and 9,999 members you get a full year free from the day the bot joins. From 10,000 to under 300,000 the trial is 30 days, since large servers cost real money to run. Nothing pauses suddenly: see the billing ladder on the pricing page for the warnings and grace period before that happens.
Subscribing, renewing, cancelling
Subscriptions are managed from your dashboard, where checkout and billing are handled by Paddle, our merchant of record. Yearly is the default and works out cheaper: paying yearly costs ten months rather than twelve. Cancelling is one click and takes effect at the end of the period you already paid for. Full details, including EU and UK withdrawal rights, are on the refund policy.
The smallest paid tier is yearly only. At that price a monthly charge would be mostly card fees, so offering it would mean charging more for the privilege of paying monthly than the convenience is worth.
If your server is still on a trial, with a day or more left, you can subscribe without giving up the days you have left. Your payment method is collected at checkout and nothing is charged until the trial ends, on the date the dashboard and the checkout both show you. The trial warnings stop, the server carries on, and cancelling before that date costs nothing.
One subscription, any number of servers
A subscription is not tied to a single server. From your dashboard, add any of your other servers to it and they are billed together, once, by their combined member count. There is no limit on how many servers a subscription can cover and no separate step to set it up. It is simply what a subscription can do.
We add up the member counts of every server on the subscription. Someone in three of your servers counts three times, because that is three times the work for the bot. A server under 100 members is free forever whether or not it shares a subscription, and never counts toward the total.
Adding a server needs Manage Server on it, since you are attesting to its member count and agreeing to be charged for it. Removing one does not, so whoever is paying can always remove a server even after losing access to it. Removing a server does not refund anything, and while the subscription is still running it does not lose service outright: it falls back to its own plan based on its own member count, landing in a fresh grace period rather than being paused. Once a subscription has ended, its servers stay as they are and contacting us is the way to move them.
If a shared subscription lapses, is cancelled, or is refunded, every server billed on it pauses within an hour, the same way a single subscription pauses one server. Servers under 100 members are not billed on it and keep working, as above. Nothing is deleted, and resubscribing brings every server back immediately.
When the total grows past your plan
First, the part that matters: growing is not a price change. The price of the tier you paid for never changes during the term you paid for. If your servers grow past that tier's ceiling we tell you, nothing changes for 60 days, and the higher tier's price applies only from the moment you choose it.
Your plan covers a member range, and one subscription sits nearer the top of that range than any single server would, so it is worth knowing what a crossing costs. A subscription at 9,900 members is on the Rare plan at $2.50 a month, billed yearly ($30). If a server on it grows by another 150 members, the total crosses into Epic, which is $7.50 a month ($90). That is the largest step in the ladder, and the same growth on a single server billed alone would have cost $1.50 a month ($18).
Nothing happens suddenly. We only count sustained growth, so a busy weekend never changes anything, and there is a 60-day window with everything still working before a plan change is needed. Your dashboard shows the running total against your plan's limit so you can see a crossing coming, and adding a server that would put you over is refused on the spot rather than quietly upgrading you. If the shape of the ladder makes separate subscriptions cheaper for your servers, that is a fair thing to do and the dashboard has the numbers to work it out.
Other ways to run AVC
AVC is also fully open source and self-hostable, free with no billing at all. The hosted service buys convenience, never features. See the command reference for everything the bot can do once it is running.
Questions
The support server is where development actually happens, and we would rather answer a question than have you guess.