Witchly's Coin Economy Explained: Earning, Spending, and Keeping Your Free Server Running
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Witchly’s free tier isn’t an ad-supported afterthought or a 30-day trial in disguise. It’s a real, free-forever hosting plan where you keep your server alive by earning coins — an in-platform currency that you spend on renewals, resource upgrades, and account perks.
This post walks through the entire economy: how you earn coins, what you spend them on, and how to keep a free server running indefinitely without paying anything.
Why an economy at all?
Most “free” game-server hosts either show ads inside your players’ game client (which violates most game licenses), shut down servers after 30 days, or rate-limit them so badly that nobody actually plays. None of those work for a community.
Witchly’s approach: anyone can host for free, but you have to actively use the platform to keep your server alive. That’s the trade. The coins you earn function like a renewal currency — they prove you’re still around and the server is still wanted by someone, which lets us keep the lights on for active communities and reclaim resources from abandoned ones.
In practice, you only need to put in a few minutes of activity per week to keep a server running forever.
How you earn coins
There are three main earning methods, and they stack.
1. AFK earning on the dashboard — 1 coin per minute
The simplest method: open the dashboard, sit on the Earn page, and your account accrues 1 coin every minute. The page commits earnings to your account on a regular heartbeat, so refreshing or briefly losing connection doesn’t lose progress.
A few things to know:
- The earn page periodically requires you to solve a quick anti-bot challenge. This isn’t optional; it’s how we keep automated coin-farming scripts from inflating the economy.
- VPN connections, proxies, and known anti-cheat-flagged IPs are blocked. If you’re getting “your connection cannot earn” errors, it’s almost always a VPN being detected.
- Your earnings are tied to your Discord-linked account, so you can earn from any device as long as you sign in.
If you do nothing else, an hour on the earn page gets you 60 coins. A half-hour every couple of days easily covers your weekly renewal.
2. Daily ritual — 50 to 350 coins
Once every 24 hours, you can claim a daily login reward from the dashboard. The rewards scale with your streak (consecutive days you’ve claimed):
| Day in streak | Reward |
|---|---|
| Day 1 | 50 coins |
| Day 2 | 100 coins |
| Day 3 | 150 coins |
| Day 4 | 200 coins |
| Day 5 | 250 coins |
| Day 6 | 300 coins |
| Day 7 | 350 coins |
A perfect 7-day streak nets you 1,400 coins — nearly three weekly renewals from logging in alone. Miss a day, and the streak resets to Day 1.
The daily ritual is by far the highest coin-per-effort earning method on the platform. If you do nothing else, claiming the daily for a week funds a server for two-plus weeks.
3. Referrals — 250 coins each side
Every account has a unique referral code. When a new user signs up using your code, both you and the new user get 250 coins once they complete their first few minutes of activity.
There’s no cap on referrals — invite ten friends and you’ve earned 2,500 coins for the bare minimum of effort. The referral signup link is on your dashboard’s Referrals page; share it on Discord, in a community post, or wherever your friends hang out.
Putting it together
A casual user earns roughly:
- 350 coins from one daily ritual claim (mid-streak)
- 300 coins from a five-minute earn session
- 250 coins from referring a single friend over the course of a week
That’s ~900 coins for a normal week of activity, which covers nearly two weekly renewals with room to spare for the occasional resource upgrade.
A power user — daily streak active, regular earn sessions, growing community — easily clears 2,000+ coins per week and can fund renewals plus pool upgrades indefinitely.
What you spend coins on
Coins work as in-platform currency for four things:
1. Server renewal — from 500 coins / 7 days
Free servers are on a rolling 7-day renewal cycle. To keep a server alive past its current cycle, click “Renew” on the dashboard server card and spend coins. The renewal extends the server’s expiry by another 7 days from the current date.
A starter server renews for 500 coins. That number isn’t fixed for everyone: your renewal scales with the size of your resource pool (the more RAM, CPU, and disk you’ve bought, the more it costs to keep alive), and your account’s total renewal is split evenly across your active servers — run two and each renews for half the total. The exact figure is always shown on the server card before you confirm.
This is the single most important coin sink. If you do nothing else, plan around your renewal amount per server per week.
2. Resource pool upgrades
Your account starts with a small resource pool that’s shared across all your servers:
- 1 server slot (you can host one server at a time)
- 2 GB RAM
- 100% CPU (one full core’s equivalent)
- 4 GB disk
You can grow this pool by spending coins in the Store:
| Upgrade | Cost | What it adds |
|---|---|---|
| +1 GB RAM | 2,000 coins | One more gigabyte of RAM allocatable across your servers |
| +100% CPU | 3,000 coins | One more core’s worth of CPU |
| +1 GB disk | 1,000 coins | One more gigabyte of disk |
| +1 server slot | 5,000 coins | Lets you host one more server simultaneously |
| Auto-renew unlock | 5,000 coins | One-time purchase. Your servers auto-renew on each cycle as long as you have the coins. |
The pool’s hard ceilings are 2 servers, 8 GB RAM, 400% CPU, 16 GB disk. Once you hit those caps, more upgrades aren’t possible on the free tier — you’d switch to an Elite plan if you needed more.
The store is on the Store page of your dashboard and shows your current pool usage at the top.
3. Coupon redemptions
The dashboard’s Coupons section accepts promo codes. Codes are issued by the Witchly team during giveaways, partner promotions (creator codes from streamers we work with), and community events. Redeeming a coupon credits coins directly to your balance.
Notably, partners often distribute long-term codes — for example, the partnered creator program — which give recurring redemptions. Keep an eye on the official Discord and partner channels.
4. The remake fee — your renewal share, for any server after the first
Your very first lifetime server is free. When you delete a server (intentionally or through expiry) and later deploy a new one into that freed-up slot, that “remake” costs coins on top of normal pool requirements.
The fee equals that server’s share of your weekly renewal — the same per-server amount you’d pay to renew it. That’s a deliberate counter to a known free-hosting exploit: cycle-create-let-expire-create-again to dodge the renewal economy. Because recreating costs roughly what renewing would have, the exploit nets you nothing — while genuine long-term communities are unaffected.
Auto-renew: set-and-forget mode
If you’ve got the coins to spare and don’t want to think about renewals, the auto-renew unlock (5,000 coins, one-time purchase) does what it sounds like. Once unlocked, every server you own automatically renews on its expiry day as long as you have enough coins to cover its renewal.
The unlock is account-wide — you only buy it once, and it covers every server you create afterward.
When auto-renew is on but your balance can’t cover a renewal, the renewal sweep silently skips the server and it suspends like normal. You can recover by topping up your balance and manually renewing within the grace window (more on that below).
What if I run out of coins?
If your server’s renewal date hits and you can’t cover the renewal (and auto-renew can’t fire), the server is suspended — it stops, but its data is preserved.
You then have a grace window to renew. After the window closes, the server’s files are permanently deleted along with it.
Two takeaways:
- Don’t let your balance go to zero if you have an active community. Even a quick 5-minute earn session each day is enough buffer.
- If your server suspends, log in and renew immediately. Don’t wait until you “have time” — once the grace window closes, there is no recovery.
Tips for keeping coins flowing
A few habits that work well:
- Bookmark the earn page and visit it for 10 minutes whenever you’d otherwise be doomscrolling. You’ll never miss renewals.
- Claim the daily ritual every day, even if you don’t need the coins right now. The streak compounds, and Day 7 (350 coins) is too good to leave on the table.
- Share your referral link in your server’s Discord or any community where friends might want to host. 250 coins per signup adds up fast.
- Set a calendar reminder for the day before your server expires until you’ve internalised the 7-day cycle. After a few weeks, it becomes second nature.
- Keep a buffer, especially if you have multiple servers. Aim for 1,500-2,000 coins minimum so a missed earn session doesn’t suspend a server.
When does Elite make sense?
The free tier supports two servers up to 8 GB RAM, 400% CPU, 16 GB disk. For most communities — small Minecraft servers, Discord music bots, dev sandboxes, modpack experiments — that’s plenty.
Elite plans make sense when:
- You’ve maxed your free pool and want more headroom (Elite RAM goes well past 16 GB)
- You want guaranteed uptime without thinking about renewals or coin balances
- You want dedicated hardware (the Elite plan tier includes dedicated resource guarantees)
- You’re hosting something revenue-adjacent (a community server with donations, a public service) and want stability over coin-saving
Elite plans start at $2/mo for the lightest applications and runtimes, and scale up from there.
The math, if you like math
For a single starter server in cruise mode:
- Renewal cost: 500 coins/week
- Daily ritual at average streak: ~200 coins/day = 1,400 coins/week
- Net surplus: ~900 coins/week to spend on upgrades or save for slot expansions
Daily ritual alone covers ~2.8x a starter renewal. AFK earning and referrals are bonus on top.
For two servers, the key thing to understand is that your renewal is split, not doubled. Your account has one total weekly renewal, divided across your active servers:
- If you haven’t upgraded your pool, your total stays around 500 coins/week — roughly 250 per server — even with two running.
- If you’ve bought RAM/CPU/disk upgrades to actually power two capable servers, that total rises with your pool, but it’s still one total split across both — never two separate full renewals.
Either way, daily-ritual income (~1,400 coins/week) comfortably covers it for the casual user. The economy is genuinely sustainable if you stay engaged — that’s the deal.
Wrapping up
The coin economy is the engine behind free-forever hosting. Active communities keep their servers alive easily. Inactive accounts get reclaimed naturally. Nobody pays a cent unless they specifically want the dedicated-resource guarantees of an Elite plan.
If you’re new, the easiest entry path is:
- Sign up via Discord
- Deploy your first server (no coins needed; the first server is free)
- Claim the daily ritual once a day for a week
- Use the coins to renew, with surplus going into your pool
By the end of two weeks, you’ll have a sustainable balance and never think about it again. For the deeper guides, see the Coin Economy doc and the server renewal walkthrough.