Donate
Every date starts a server.
Somebody pays for that, and right now it is us, happily, and with no plans to stop. DateSMP is free, all of it, and it is staying free whether or not you read past this sentence.
If you ever felt like helping carry the bill, though, we would be quietly over the moon about it.
Where it goes
Mostly servers.
A date does not happen on a server we are already paying for. Each one gets a whole Minecraft server of its own, which we host for the length of the evening and then destroy.
Date servers
A whole Minecraft server per date, not a room on a shared one. We start one when a date starts and destroy it at the end. The biggest line by far, and it grows with every date booked.
The Hub, the app and the API
The always-on server everybody links their character on, plus photo storage and the domain.
Art and activities
Every activity is a hand-built world with its own artwork. New ones keep arriving.
Replacing the placeholder artwork
The illustrations around DateSMP were generated to get it open. We are working towards replacing all of them with handcrafted work by real designers.
Being straight with you
Some of this artwork is AI, and we want it gone.
It got DateSMP open while we were covering the costs ourselves, and it was always meant to be temporary. We are working towards replacing every one of these images with handcrafted work by real designers.
Nobody's evening depends on it.
Whether you have given us fifty euro or nothing at all, you get the same deck, the same matches and the same night. The matching code refuses to read a supporter field, so it cannot quietly start mattering later on when somebody is looking for a lever to pull.
That is not us being coy about what a donation gets you. It is the reason a donation is worth making: the thing you would be paying for is a version of this where the person who cannot pay still gets the whole of it.
And if you would rather not, that is genuinely fine.
Signing up, matching, planning a date and playing one cost nothing, and they will keep costing nothing. If you want to help and money is not it, telling one person about DateSMP does about as much as a fiver.
Donations are gifts rather than purchases. The donations and refunds policy explains what that means.