Pricing
Rift is free.
Everything that makes Rift worth using is free. Paid tiers expand your personal space and give your community more tools. They never gate the things that should have been free in the first place.
Subscriptions fund Rift. There are no ads or data sales to fall back on, and no investors asking for either.
The free tier
Free is the whole product
Most platforms make free feel like a demo. On Rift, everything below is the product itself, and it will never move behind a paywall.
Communication
Messaging, DMs, voice, video, and screen share at 720p 60fps, with 96 kbps audio and AI noise suppression. Use all of it as much as you want.
Every channel type
Text, Forum, Ticket, Gallery, Highlights, Polls, Announcements, and more, the same full versions a paid Shard gets.
Full moderation
Bans, kicks, mutes, timeouts, slowmode, audit logs, AutoMod, ticket channels, report pipeline, and the permissions inspector. Safety is never premium.
Communities
Create and join as many Shards as you like, each with unlimited members and unlimited channels.
All Portals
Music, YouTube, Twitch, Weather, Sports, Feeds, Calendar, Browser, and more. Every Portal is available to every user.
Privacy and security
E2EE direct messages, EXIF stripping, deleted messages leave the database, media proxying, and signup without a phone or email. This is the baseline every account gets.
Personal plans
Your tier travels with you
Your personal plan applies everywhere you go on Rift. Rift+ is for people who want more space and more expression. It's not required for anything important.
Free
$0Everything you need. It's the plan most people stay on.
Rift+
For people who live in Rift. $7/mo or $70/yr.
Community plans
One person pays. Everyone benefits.
One member subscribes (the owner or an admin) and the entire community gets the upgrade instantly. It isn't per seat and doesn't scale with member count; one payment covers the whole Shard.
Discord's top tier (Boost Level 3) needs 14 server boosts, usually spread across your members. Rift Shard Forge costs one person $25/mo and beats it on streaming quality.
Discord Boost Level 3 = 14 boosts, about $70 to $140/mo depending who pays, 1080p max. Shard Forge = $25/mo from one person, 1440p.
Every Shard gets full moderation for free: bans, kicks, mutes, timeouts, slowmode, audit logs, permission inspector, ticket channels, AutoMod, report pipeline. All channel types. Unlimited members and channels.
Free Shard
Fully functional on its own. Plenty of Shards never upgrade.
Shard Ember
More space, better streams, and onboarding tools for a Shard that's picking up speed.
Shard Forge
The most of everything: sharpest streams, animated everything, deepest analytics.
Voice quality stacks: if you have Rift+ in a free Shard, you get your personal tier. If you're on free in an Ember or Forge Shard, the Shard tier applies. You always get whichever is higher.
How it compares
The numbers, side by side
We're not going to pretend you've never heard of Discord. Here's what the same money gets you.
Looking for the full breakdown? See the side-by-side comparison.
Free tier vs. free tier
What you get for $0.
Community upgrades
What it costs to upgrade a server.
Comparison figures reflect publicly available Discord information and our own testing as of June 2026 and may change. Discord is a trademark of Discord Inc.; Rift is independent and not affiliated with or endorsed by Discord.
The promise
Some things are off the table permanently, and they're listed below. That's the deal. The only revenue is subscriptions from people who find Rift worth paying for, now and always.
Start with everything
Sign up and the full platform is yours. Nobody asks for a card.