Supporting Subeta
This page covers what a month of running Subeta costs, where the money goes, what the team has built lately, and how to help. More support means more art and more new things on the site.
- Subscriptions
- about $10,250 a month
- Cash Shop Credits and the rest
- about $500
Amounts round to the nearest $250. The goal covers everything that comes in, including Cash Shop Credits. Subscriptions are the part we can plan around, because they renew.
A note from Keith
October 2026
The thing I'm proudest of since my last note is Gardens.
Gardens started as a seed of an idea (sorry) and turned into something a lot of you play every day. Since that first launch I've built on it a piece at a time. You can visit any open garden at subeta.net/garden/username, and a visit speeds up the host's plants. There have been over a million visits since May. Some seeds are event-only now, like the Celebratory Sprinkle Seeds from anniversary week, and three seeds morph one of your pets into a new species, most recently the Pipaphyta Muscivorus and the Milnesium Fragarius.
Building it in small steps and watching you use each one has felt great. Start at the Gardens.
The trend, year by year
One bar per year. Each bar is sized relative to our best year, which was 2017. Specific dollar amounts intentionally left off, but the shape of it is the story.
- 2008
- 2009
- 2010
- 2011
- 2012
- 2013
- 2014
- 2015
- 2016
- 2017 peak
- 2018
- 2019
- 2020
- 2021
- 2022
- 2023
- 2024
- 2025
- 2026 YTD
The line went up steadily until 2017, plateaued, and has been drifting down ever since. The 2026 bar is a partial year, so it will keep growing until December.
Where the money goes
Rough breakdown of where the money goes, averaged across the last year. These aren't exact numbers, but they're honest. If something here surprises you, it's probably "lawyers and accountants."
- Team wages 52%
- Mostly part-time. This is the illustrators, user administrators, and content managers who draw and run Subeta. I'm the only programmer, and I don't draw a wage (more on that in the older note at the bottom of the page). The team has barely changed in a decade. An open position on this list would be a real event.
- Servers, CDN, email 16%
- Bigger than you'd expect. The image CDN serves around 30 million pet and item image requests a day.
- AI scraper load and defense 6%
- New line item, and growing. LLM training crawlers hammer the site disguised as regular browsers, rotating through millions of residential IP addresses to slip past rate limits. They eat bandwidth, CPU, and a lot of my time writing the heuristics to keep them off. They can spike a sleepy Tuesday into a half-down site. Other small communities are quietly folding under it. Weird Gloop wrote up the gory details if you want a longer read.
- Legal, accounting, tax 12%
- Required when you are an LLC accepting payments in many jurisdictions. The line item that used to be "an accountant and a year-end tax return" now also includes ongoing review of age-verification and ID laws as they pass in different countries and states (more on that just below).
- Payment processing 8%
- Stripe and PayPal fees on cash shop purchases and subscriptions. The price you see is what we charge. The fee comes out of our side.
- Tools, software, monitoring 4%
- Source hosting, google accounts, error tracking, staff chat system, the boring stuff the site runs on and we have to pay for monthly.
- Reserve, domains, the rainy day 2%
- Domain renewals (we own six), year-end tax bill, and the buffer that keeps the lights on if a month goes sideways.
Why we are talking about this in 2026
We are not a nonprofit. We are a small LLC. We are also not "raising a round" or "exploring strategic options." We have run on cash-shop revenue and subscriptions since 2004, and that is the model we plan to keep.
The small, independent web is genuinely harder to run than it used to be. Three of the things that are making it harder are below. None of them is unique to us. All of them cost money the cash shop used to comfortably cover.
Cohost is the recent one most of you know
Cohost shut down in September 2024. Tens of thousands of regular users, a thoughtful team, an anti-big-tech manifesto, doing everything the way you'd want a small independent site to do it. They still ran out of money. Their stated reasons were "lack of funding and burnout." Both of those things are recognizable from this side of the screen.
A 250,000-user forum shut down rather than comply
The UK Online Safety Act took effect in March 2025. It covers any user-to-user service with "links to the UK," it has no exemption for small non-commercial sites, and it makes the site operator personally liable for what users post. Dee Kitchen, who had run the LFGSS London cycling forum and the wider Microcosm platform (around 300 sub-communities, roughly 250,000 monthly users) alone for nearly three decades, announced she would delete the servers. Her line: "The risk to me personally is too high." A handful of other small UK forums went with her, from a hamster-care board to a local Cotswolds community site.
Age-verification laws in roughly two dozen US states and parallel bills in the EU and Australia do the same thing at smaller scale: per-jurisdiction rules, geolocating every visitor, and rebuilding the flows when the next bill passes or is challenged in court. Real engineering work, real legal work, and a real chunk of what's now in the legal-and-accounting line above.
The bill for keeping bots off the site keeps going up
LLM training crawlers are now a meaningful chunk of internet traffic, and they hit the small, public, open parts of the web hardest. GNOME's GitLab measured about 97% of incoming requests as bots. Wikimedia reports bots driving about 65% of its most expensive traffic and put it plainly: "Our content is free, our infrastructure is not." SourceHut's maintainer wrote that he was spending "20-100% of any given week mitigating hyper-aggressive LLM crawlers." Read the Docs cut its bandwidth bill in half by blocking AI bots, one of which had downloaded 73 terabytes of their content in a single month.
We are running the same kinds of mitigations they are, and paying the same kind of bill. The Weird Gloop writeup below is the closest mirror to our own situation.
Subeta has more users than Cohost did, a 22-year cushion, and a model that has worked for two decades. Subscriptions are what keep that model steady.
Building the next 20 years
The money is not only going to keeping the lights on. Since we canceled Kumos, the largest single technical investment in Subeta in years has gone into the foundation, most of it under the floorboards, most of it the unsexy work that makes a 22-year-old codebase last another 20.
The dependency cull
Every PHP package on the site is now on a modern (or the newest) version. Months of work, mostly silent, exactly the kind that keeps a small site from waking up one Sunday to a critical CVE. We scrapped tens of thousands of lines of CSS along with it, including two entire versions of Bootstrap that were both being loaded at once for legacy reasons. The .card class was being touched by five cascading design systems stacked on top of each other. It is now touched by one. Each removed dependency is a potential security hole gone and one less thing anyone has to reason about the next time something has to change.
Every action, finally logged
The site now writes a real audit trail of who did what: items moved, currency spent, quests turned in, battles fought, comments posted. When a user opens a ticket about a missing item or a weird interaction, the admin who picks it up can pull a clean timeline instead of guessing. The user administrators have been asking for this for years. It also feeds future work: better fraud detection, smarter mod tools, and the kind of activity feeds that used to take a week of staff DM-archaeology to put together.
The admin and ticket tools, finally usable
The whole admin panel got rebuilt around what the team actually does day to day, rather than the 2008-era forms they were working through. The ticket system backend was overhauled at the same time, which means mods are answering faster, with more context per ticket, with less manual lookup. None of this is user-facing, but every minute a UA isn't fighting their own tools is a minute they get to spend helping people.
The battle system, finally
I re-launched the perk system as Battle Spheres, the first real change to battles in ten years, and it now runs in seasons. Beyond the new content, the part that matters is this: I can watch battles as they happen and pull real data on what is working and what isn't. We have never had that. We made balance changes on intuition for a decade. Now we can make them on what people actually do.
The first tests Subeta has ever had
While we were rebuilding all of this I wrote the first automated tests in the site's history. There are now over 4,000 of them, covering the things that should never break: moving an item from your inventory to your vault, the math behind battle damage, currency transactions, login flows. Every one of them runs on every change. The site is significantly more secure than it has ever been, and the gap is still widening.
The messy part, honestly
You have probably noticed pages looking wonky for a day or two, or a feature changing twice before it settles. The new shop search thread is a fair example: I took a swing based on ten years of accumulated feedback, the data we now have, and my own gut, and some of it landed and some of it had to be walked back. New features now start with a percentage of players and a poll, so the walking back happens before everyone sees it. I am going to get things wrong. The upside of being one person on the code is that I am also very willing to change it back, fast, when I do.
What's been shipping, since we canceled Kumos
Highlights from the months since, newest first. The changelog has all of it.
Gardens: visits, event seeds, and pet seeds
subeta.net/garden/username, and visitors speed up the host's plants. There have been over a million visits since May. Some seeds only exist for an event, like the Celebratory Sprinkle Seeds you could only give away during anniversary week. Three seeds morph one of your pets into a new species, and the newest two, the Pipaphyta Muscivorus and the Milnesium Fragarius, are garden exclusive. Plots, the plant notebook, and branching seeds that grow into different forms came with the 2.0 rebuild.
go garden →
Battle Spheres, Season 5
Name plates
Pet tags
Quests on the new system
Pet Spotlight, now community-moderated
User hovers, completely redesigned
Wardrobe Contests
Wardrobe Effects
Item Directory, rebuilt
Studio art powers cosmetic prizes
The bug and suggestion trackers
What's coming up next
Not promises. Things I'm actively working on or starting on. Dates are not yet a thing.
User Profiles V3
A few new pages, with some of you first
Pet Profiles V2 (opt-in)
What you can do, in plain order
These are listed in the order that helps most, but anything on the list helps. Posting a bug helps. Telling a friend who used to play helps a lot.
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01
Subscriptions →
Subscribe, or renew your subscription
Four tiers, from Keeper at $3 a month to Goddess at $15. Subscriptions renew, which is what lets us plan, and you can change tiers or cancel from the same page.
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02
Cash Shop Credits →
Buy Cash Shop Credits
Every Cash Shop Credit you buy counts toward the goal. Credits are fun to spend, and buying them keeps the lights on.
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03
Bugs forum →
Post the bug you've been quietly hating
Bugs get a status now, and fixed ones show on the known issues board. If a thing has bugged you since 2019 and you assumed nobody would ever fix it, post it.
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04
Suggestions forum →
Post the feature you've wanted
Suggestions get a status too, and the roadmap shows which ones are planned or being built. If your idea got ignored, reply to it.
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05
Feedback forum →
Answer the polls on new features
When a test is open you'll see a notice at the top of the page and a short poll. The answers change what gets built.
The team your support pays
A few of the people behind everything above. Hover any of them to see who they are.
An older note from Keith
From June 2026
Subeta has been running for 22 years. The team is a ragtag set of illustrators, user administrators, content managers, a business manager (our COO, who keeps the rest of us honest), and me, the only programmer, and the person who owns the LLC. Most have been here a decade or more. We haven't had an open position in ages, which is mostly a good thing and a little bit a bad thing, because it means we have not grown.
I should be straight about my part of this. Subeta is not my day job. For the last ten years I've worked in civic tech, helping governments deliver services to people who deserve better ones. Subeta is my hobby. I haven't taken a paycheck from it in years. (Timeline here, if you want it.) I'm not trying to grow Subeta into a venture-backed anything. I'm trying to keep a clubhouse open, and to keep paying the people who help me keep it open.
Here is the part I have been avoiding writing for a while. We are not "sleep better with a bigger reserve" thin. We are closer to the line than that. Cash shop revenue has been trending down month over month for a long time. Active users have been dwindling alongside it. The goal on this page is the honest number: what we need to bring in each day from the cash shop and subscriptions to cover what running Subeta actually costs. The trend is going the wrong way, and it has been going the wrong way long enough that I have stopped telling myself it will work itself out.
Two months ago we canceled Project Kumos, the ground-up Laravel rewrite we'd been chasing in one form or another since 2022. I learned more from canceling it than I did from doing it. Every day since, I've been investing directly in the legacy site, because that's where Subeta actually is, and where the next 20 years are going to be built. The team and I have shipped more in the two months since canceling Kumos than in the last two years of trying to chase Kumos. There is a list further up this page. It is longer than I expected.
Some of what is on that list: a complete redesign of user hovers, a redesigned pet spotlight with community moderation, two new ways to dress and decorate your avatar (Wardrobe Contests and Wardrobe Effects), a Gardens overhaul, an Item Directory rebuild, cosmetic prizes drawn from the user-submitted Studio, the first major change to the battle system in ten years, a mobile beta, and a lot of plumbing. Two months. One programmer.
We have plot ideas we can't afford to build right now, and I'd love to. A thin month means keeping the lights on. A full one means we get to make something new again.
I'll keep going as long as you all keep showing up. Thanks for being here.