Vania is Now Free

What's more important, the data or the jazz? Sure, sure, 'Information should be free' and all that --but anyone can set information free. The jazz is in how you do it, what you do it to, and in almost getting caught without getting caught. The data is 1's and 0's. Life is the jazz.

Datatech Sinder Roze, Alpha Centauri, Firaxis Games

Ahoy!

When my brother Dan and I started Vania last year - with no small amount of artistic help from Dan’s wife, Sarah - it was a side project to solve some of my own frustrations as an indie game marketing consultant.

Or to put it another way, I bullied Dan into make me a tool to make my job easier. Then again, I am the older brother, so such is my right.

We had planned to spend more time on it since and perhaps turn it into a side business, but unfortunately life got in the way.

When we sat down to chat about what to do about this we both felt that, alongside dedicating some more time to turn Vania into the platform we want, we also wanted this to be less of a business and more of a community.

So as of today, we’ve decided to make all features of Vania free to all users and remove all limits. Vania will remain ad free as well.

To help fund the project, we’ve set up a Patreon where you can donate a few coins to us a month to cover our server costs as we work.

All new features will also remain free, though we may add some little bonuses and cosmetic things to the Patreon tiers in the future.

What happens to paid accounts?

Your account will work as a premium account exactly as before, though you may seem some limits increase depending on the plan. IF you have any issues let us know in Discord and we'll solve them.

Subscriptions have been cancelled as of today, and I've issued a refund for the last payment that was made. If you feel like Vania has overall not been worth it during the time you've been using it, do ping me on Discord or [email protected] and I will fully refund the lifetime of your account for you.

Why make things free?

Firstly, we don’t want to be charging customers for a project that isn’t our daily main priority, it didn’t seem fair.

But beyond that, I guess it just felt a little more true to what we wanted to create.

Dan and I grew up in a world where even a few pounds a month for a subscription would have been impossible. By making everything free for everyone, we hope that devs that do find the platform useful won’t mind throwing in a few coins to keep the lights on for those who can’t. Yay, video game socialism!

We’ve stopped short of making Vania fully open source for now - part of working on Vania for us is working together, and open source projects tend to spend more time organising than they do developing. [Dan Sidenote: It's totally not that I'm embarrassed of the cobbled together code to make Vania work] We both a bucket load of ideas for features and improvements, and, frankly, part of the reason we work on this is to do something together.

But that doesn’t mean we won’t be very open about what we’re doing! Even if you can’t afford to help support us, we’d love to have you on the Discord! Dan is a sort of engine that turns user feedback into code at extremely high efficiency, so the more we know about what you folks want, the easier it is for us to build it.

• Rob, Vania