Sonoran CAD is the market leader for FiveM roleplay communities. They are also the only major CAD vendor that refuses to publish their pricing on a public page.
Try it. Open their pricing page. You cannot tell what you will pay until you log in and start a Stripe checkout flow. That is a deliberate choice.
We dug into it. Here is what we found.
The pricing model, the part Sonoran will tell you
Sonoran has tiers. Names rotate, structure stays roughly the same:
- Free. Limited CAD, no API access, no in-game integration, occasional reclamation.
- Standard / Plus. API access begins, more concurrent users.
- Premium / Pro. Everything turned on.
- Sonoran One. Bundle of CAD, CMS, and Radio.
Quarterly billing is 25% cheaper than monthly. There is no annual option. No free trial of paid tiers.
You cannot see the actual numbers from the public site. They live behind a JavaScript-rendered Stripe checkout. Community reports across years of forum threads place tier pricing at $5 to $50 per month. Sonoran One is meaningfully more than the sum of its parts.
That is the part Sonoran tells you.
The part Sonoran does not tell you
Per-API gating
Sonoran’s API has tiers. Some endpoints, like fetching your community’s calls list, require Plus or higher. From their own docs:
The /calls endpoint requires a Plus subscription or higher.
If your in-game integration needs that endpoint, you upgrade. There is no “API access” you can buy as an add-on. You buy the tier.
Every customer review eventually hits this wedge. Sonoran sells CAD, but they also sell a developer product, and the developer product’s gate moves. New endpoints quietly land in higher tiers. The integration you wrote two years ago might require an endpoint that moved up. Your bill went up too.
Community ID inactivity reclamation
If your community goes inactive, defined by Sonoran, your community ID can be reclaimed. From the pricing FAQ:
Inactive communities may have their community ID reclaimed and reissued.
Routine SaaS policy. Bites in roleplay where servers go dormant for a season and come back. If your community ID is reissued, your custom URL slug, your saved character data, and your accumulated audit log can disappear. Recovery is at Sonoran’s discretion.
Quarterly only
Sonoran’s only meaningful discount is the 25% quarterly billing offer. There is no annual plan. If you want a longer commitment, you cannot get it.
That is unusual in SaaS. Most vendors offer annual because retention is worth the discount. Sonoran’s read seems to be that quarterly is the longest commitment they want their tier prices locked into. Possibly because the tiers themselves change.
Sonoran One, the bundle math
Sonoran One bundles CAD, CMS, and Radio. Community reports describe it as very expensive relative to the parts. We could not get hard numbers from the public site, but the upsell path Sonoran walks you through inside the dashboard suggests Sonoran One is positioned as the recurring revenue product, not a discount.
What Sonoran is actually good at
To be fair: Sonoran has the largest installed base in FiveM. Their CAD has features ours does not yet. Stream Deck plugin. Twitch integration. Dispatch AI add-on (sold separately). iOS and Android apps that work. Their team has been building this for years.
If you need exactly what Sonoran does, there is a credible argument for paying them.
Where the model breaks down
For most communities we talk to, the issue is not features. It is the model itself:
- You can’t budget. Pricing is opaque, tiers shift, API endpoints move between them.
- You’re locked in by data. Your characters, calls, and configs live in their schema. Switching means rebuilding.
- You pay for products you don’t need. Sonoran’s bundle path pushes Radio and CMS even if your community already has those covered.
Sovura, the opposite of all three
We picked the opposite of those things on purpose.
- Every plan ships every module. No tier gates a feature. We gate scale. Members, on-duty units, live map refresh rate. Read the full table here.
- Pricing is public. $0 / $19 / $39 / $59 a month. Annual saves 25%. The page has not moved in months and will not.
- No per-API gating. If a feature exists, every plan can hit it.
In direct terms: Sovura Pro at $29 a month annual ships unlimited applications, unlimited helpdesk tickets, 1,000 CAD characters, and 100 concurrent on-duty units. Live map refreshes every 10 seconds. Every module is included.
That is closer to what Sonoran One pretends to be, at less than a third of what we hear it costs.
Founding Membership, for the buyer who hates subscriptions
If this whole post resonates with you, that subscription pricing in roleplay has gotten weird and opaque, we offer a one-time alternative.
Founding Membership is $299 once.
- Pro plan locked in for the lifetime of Sovura
- Founding badge on your community
- Direct access to the team
- Early access to every module we ship
Thirty spots. Counting them down on the pricing page.
That is the answer to the “I want to own it forever” instinct that drives people to lifetime Tebex scripts. Done honestly.
What to do next
If you are on Sonoran today, you do not need to switch tomorrow. You need three things:
- Audit your actual bill. Log in, check the tier you are on plus any add-ons.
- Map the endpoints you use. If they all live on Standard or below, you are fine for now. If anything needs Plus or higher, you have a moving target.
- Watch the renewal. Quarterly billing makes the next switch decision easy. You have a checkpoint every 90 days.
We are not asking you to leave Sonoran. We are asking you to look at the bill.