Strategy 7 min read

The Real Cost of Running a FiveM Community in 2026

Discord ticket bots, Sonoran CAD, a Wix site, Tebex scripts. We did the math on what running a real FiveM RP community actually costs each year.

Vexoa

If you run a serious FiveM roleplay community in 2026, you are probably not paying for one product. You are paying for five.

Nobody walks you through the math. You buy a CAD. You buy a Discord bot. You stand up a Wix site. You grab a few Tebex scripts. By the end of the year your community quietly costs as much as a part-time hire.

We added it up.

The typical FiveM stack

Most serious roleplay servers run something like this:

  • A CAD/MDT for police, EMS, dispatch, and civilians
  • A Discord ticket bot for player support
  • A community website for news, rules, departments, and applications
  • A whitelist application system for new player vetting
  • A Discord server with at least one paid bot tier
  • The FXServer host itself

That is six line items before a single feature lands that your players will actually praise.

What each one costs

CAD/MDT

The biggest line item if you take roleplay seriously.

  • Sonoran CAD. Pricing hidden behind a Stripe checkout. Community reports place it at $5 to $50 per month. We broke down the full pricing model here.
  • CDE CAD. Flat $19.99 per month, or $15 with annual billing. CAD only.
  • SnailyCAD. Free and open source. You host it yourself. Pay for the VPS, pay for the time.
  • Hamz CAD. $55 one-time on hamz.dev. Standalone, framework-agnostic.

For most growing communities, CAD lands at $15 to $50 per month. Roughly $240 to $600 a year.

Discord ticket bot

Free tier bots work for small servers. Once you have real support load, you upgrade.

  • Tickety Premium. $5.99 per month per server, or $49.99 a year.
  • Helper.gg Premium. $4.90 per month per server.
  • Ticket Tool Premium. Pricing not on a public page. Plans exist behind their dashboard.

Realistic cost: $60 to $90 a year, plus the ongoing pain of running real support inside Discord channels.

Community website

Players want to read your rules, see your departments, and know where to apply.

  • Wix Light. Cheapest paid tier in the mid-teens per month. Higher tiers run into the $30-40 range for serious sites with custom domains and storage.
  • Webflow CMS. $23 per month annual, the lowest CMS-capable plan.
  • Custom Next.js on Vercel. Zero per month, plus 20+ hours of dev time you do not get back.

Realistic cost: $200 to $400 a year, or one weekend you will never see again.

Application system

Whitelist forms drive everything else. Get them wrong, you onboard chaos.

  • FiveList. Free tier exists. Premium pricing is not on a public page.
  • Sonoran CMS Applications. Bundled with their CMS plan.
  • Discord bot plus Google Forms. Free, but lets duplicate apps through, no audit trail, no internal staff notes.

Realistic cost if you pay for it: another $60 to $120 a year. Free if you accept the chaos.

Tebex script ecosystem

Most communities also pay for individual FiveM resources. Dispatch overlays, MDT scripts, vehicle integrations. The marketplace runs $5 to $60 per script. The average serious server runs 5 to 15 of them.

Conservative cost: $100 to $300 once, plus whatever you pay for “lifetime updates” that are not actually lifetime.

The total

Pulling it together for a typical police-RP server with serious staff:

Line itemAnnual cost
CAD/MDT (mid tier Sonoran)$360
Discord ticket bot premium$72
Wix community site (mid tier)$300
Whitelist application system$96
Tebex script bundle (amortised)$200
Totalabout $1,028 a year

That is roughly $85 a month for four broken integrations between five products that do not talk to each other.

Your actual number will swing depending on which CAD you pay, which website builder you pick, and how many Tebex scripts your community runs. We have seen invoices land anywhere from $700 to $1,400 a year for a serious server. The point is the same. It adds up fast.

Where Sovura sits

Sovura’s Pro plan is $29 per month with annual billing. $348 a year. For that, you replace every line item above except your FXServer host and your Discord server.

You stop paying Sonoran. You stop paying for the ticket bot. You stop paying Wix. Applications, sites, helpdesk, CAD, departments, and roles are one product, one bill, one login.

The math is simple: $348 against $1,028. You save about $680 and consolidate four maintenance contracts into one.

If you want to never think about bills again, Founding Membership is $299 once for the lifetime of Pro. About 8 months of Pro for forever.

Why does the math break down this way?

Because the FiveM ecosystem grew up product by product.

Tebex shipped first as a script marketplace, so people got used to one-time licenses. Sonoran shipped CAD, then bolted CMS onto it, then bolted Radio onto it. Discord bots filled in everything else.

Nobody set out to design a unified roleplay community platform. We did.

What to do next

Three things will save you money this year:

  1. Add up your actual bills. Open your Stripe dashboard, your Tebex purchases, your bot subscriptions. Most owners are surprised.
  2. Audit what each tool replaces. A ticket bot pretending to be a helpdesk. A Discord channel pretending to be an application form. A Wix site pretending to be a community.
  3. Pick a consolidation moment. Renewals are a good time. So is the moment one of your tools breaks every time FXServer updates.

We did not build Sovura to be the cheapest option. We built it to be the only one you need.

Try the free tier →