Sovura vs SnailyCAD: Why Free Isn't Free

SnailyCAD is the open source CAD/MDT for FiveM. The license fee is zero. The total cost of ownership is not.

If you have a developer on staff who genuinely enjoys running infrastructure, SnailyCAD is a credible path. For everyone else, Sovura is the better long-term play. Here’s why.

What “free” actually costs

Run a serious FiveM community on SnailyCAD and your real annual cost looks like this:

• VPS that can handle realtime websockets, Postgres, and growth. $20 to $50 a month, $240 to $600 a year.
• Your time. Deploying updates, running database migrations, configuring reverse proxy, renewing SSL, debugging the disk filling up, watching logs at 2am. Realistic estimate: 5 to 20 hours a month.
• Backups. Either you set up automated backups (your problem) or you don’t (your bigger problem).
• Security patches. SnailyCAD ships often. So does Postgres. So does Node. You patch all of it.
• Tools SnailyCAD doesn’t ship. A helpdesk. A whitelist application system. A public community website. Department panels. You pay for those separately or build them yourself.

Total annual cash cost for a real community on SnailyCAD plus the surrounding stack: $300 to $700, plus your time.

What Sovura ships instead

One product. One login. One bill. We host it.

Sovura Pro at $29 a month annual ($348 a year) ships:

• Computer aided dispatch with realtime live map
• A real helpdesk with SLAs, satisfaction ratings, agent presence
• Whitelist applications with eleven field types and Discord webhook triggers
• A block-based community website on your custom domain
• Department roster, duty sessions, ranks, callsigns, badges
• 46 scoped capabilities, signed webhooks with delivery logs

You sign up. The CAD works. The helpdesk works. The applications work. The community site works. They share a database, a permission system, and a UI. We patch it. We back it up. We watch the logs.

The honest math

The cash gap is small. The labor gap is enormous. The bundle gap is bigger than both.

What you give up running open source

• No team to call. When something breaks at 2am, you read the GitHub issues and hope someone’s awake.
• No coordinated roadmap. Features land when contributors ship them.
• No SLA. SnailyCAD’s authors do not owe you uptime.
• No bundle. SnailyCAD is a CAD. Period. Everything else is your problem.

These aren’t bugs in the SnailyCAD project. They are the reality of using free software as the backbone of a community that takes itself seriously.

When Sovura wins

• Your time is more valuable than the dollar saved.
• Nobody on your team wants to be on call for the CAD.
• You need a CAD plus the four other things a real roleplay community runs.
• You want one bill, one login, and one team to call.

That is most communities.

The Founding lock-in

If subscriptions aren’t your style, Founding Membership is $299 once for the lifetime of Pro. Cheaper than a year of any paid CAD subscription. Cheaper than the labor cost of self-hosting SnailyCAD for one summer.

Thirty spots. Counting them down on the pricing page.

What if you don’t want to bet on us forever

Fair concern. Sovura publishes a written Continuity Promise: if we ever sunset, you get six months notice, full data export, and either a successor operator, an open-source self-host edition, or a free self-host license with source code. Founding Members get this in their purchase agreement.

You don’t trade self-host independence for hosted convenience. You get both: hosted today, self-host path if we ever stop running it.

The bottom line

Free software is a starting point. It isn’t a finished community platform.

If you want a CAD, a helpdesk, applications, a community site, and a department roster all running on one product, hosted by a team that ships every week, Sovura is what you want.

Start free → — every module unlocked, no card required.