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Subscription and Pricing
September 16, 2026 at 02:40 PM
Initial version (2026-09-16)
Monsters & Memories is funded by a flat monthly subscription. There is no box price, no purchase required to download the client, and no in-game store. The fee is 15 US dollars per month, per account, and it covers all content updates for as long as it is paid.
Item | Position |
|---|---|
Price | 15 US dollars per month, per account |
Included | Game access, all content updates, customer service support, live service operations and live events |
Box price | None |
In-game microtransactions | None |
Paid head start | None. The developer states it will not sell head start services |
Regional pricing | None. Payment processing supports local currency in many cases, but the price is not adjusted by region |
Free trial | Not offered as a product. Free public playtests ran throughout development instead |
Gift subscriptions | Planned, but expected to be turned off at launch |
The regional point is worth reading carefully. Local currency is supported at the payment processing layer, but the amount is not localised: whatever 15 US dollars converts to in a given currency is the price of the subscription there.
Billing activates on Monday, September 21, 2026, targeting 9am Eastern. That first payment covers October, so subscribing on the 21st does not mean paying twice before the game opens. The next charge falls on November 1, 2026. Subscribing on the 21st also unlocks character creation ahead of launch, at five characters per server, rising to 25 per server on October 1. See Early Access for the rest of the pre-launch sequence.
The no microtransactions position is scoped to the game client. It is accurate as stated and it is not the whole picture, because three other revenue streams exist outside it.
A physical merchandise store opens on September 21, 2026, the same day as billing and targeting the same 9am Eastern time. It sells physical goods only: shirts, mugs, prints, socks, hoodies, beanies and full sized gnome cuddle pillows. The developer flags the store as being in a beta state at opening. It was held back deliberately rather than launched early, on the stated reasoning that the team did not want to take money before the game was live. Merchandise has been the planned alternative to cosmetic microtransactions since 2021, and that commitment has held.
An in-client tip jar is confirmed for Early Access, though no exact availability date has been published as of September 2026. Its constraints are all stated by the developer:
Tips are limited to a range of 5 to 500 US dollars. The floor exists to limit exposure to chargebacks
Tips are anonymised
Tips carry no special benefits of any kind in game
Money goes to the team's shared reserve rather than to any individual developer
Tip income is tracked and published alongside the rest of the project's revenue figures
Gift subscriptions are planned but, as of September 2026, the developer expects to have them turned off at launch. No date has been given for switching them on.
The stated reasoning connects the business model to the development model described on Niche Worlds Cult. The team is made up of volunteers working in their spare time. Revenue from subscriptions and merchandise is intended to let the team pay some of its members while others remain volunteers, and to scale art and design production so that the world can be filled in faster than a spare time schedule allows.
The developer has also published its own arithmetic on how many subscribers that takes, and it is smaller than the team size suggests. Speaking in April 2026 with a team of 49 people, the position was that the subset they want paid soonest is about 12 people, that maintaining more than 10,000 to 15,000 subscribers steadily would let them move more people onto paid roles, and that even a small subscriber base at launch would leave the project in a better financial position than it has been in.
Development has been funded out of the founders' pockets, with no crowdfunding, no publisher and no outside investment, and the team publishes its expense totals. Spending stood at just over 160,000 US dollars through May 2026. The full breakdown and the earlier figures are on Niche Worlds Cult.
For the post-launch period the developer has committed to continue publishing expense breakdowns, to add a revenue breakdown split by source across subscriptions, tips and merchandise, and to publish how profit is allocated across three named pools: profit sharing, growth, and reserves. Reserves are earmarked first for severance for anyone brought on full time, which the team has made a precondition for hiring anyone full time at all.
