Soul Bond: How Auto-Renewal Works on Free Witchly Servers
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Free servers on Witchly expire every seven days. You renew them by spending coins — 500 for a starter server, more once you’ve upgraded your pool — and most users do that manually: log in, click Renew, done.
But if you’ve ever forgotten, you know the feeling. Server goes into a grace window, then suspends, then deletes. World gone. Configs gone. Players gone.
Soul Bond is the artifact that prevents this. Buy it once, and every free server you own auto-renews itself from your coin balance — no clicking required.
What Soul Bond actually does
When you purchase Soul Bond from the Store, three things happen:
- 5,000 coins are deducted from your balance
- The artifact is permanently bound to your account — a one-time unlock that never expires
- Auto-Renew is switched on for every free server you currently own, automatically
From that point on, the renewal sweep runs every day looking for servers that are due. For each of your servers it checks: if Auto-Renew is on and you have enough coins to cover that server’s renewal, it deducts the renewal amount and rolls the expiry date forward seven days. No notification spam, no clicking, no anxiety.
For servers you create after purchasing Soul Bond, auto-renewal is off by default — you toggle it on per-server in the server manage page. The reason: you might want some servers to auto-renew and others (e.g. a test server you’d rather have expire) to stay manual.
What Soul Bond does NOT do
This is the part people misunderstand. Soul Bond is not a coin generator. It’s a convenience layer on top of the existing renewal economy.
- It does not renew your servers for free. Each server’s renewal (starting at 500 coins per week and scaling with your pool) is still deducted.
- It does not prevent suspension if your coin balance runs short. If the renewal sweep tries to charge a server’s renewal and finds you can’t cover it, it skips the renewal and the server enters the grace window like any non-bonded server.
- It does not apply to Elite servers. Elite servers are billed through Stripe and follow the subscription lifecycle, not the coin cycle.
- It does not carry across accounts. The flag is per-user.
If your balance runs dry, Soul Bond servers fail to renew exactly the same way a manual server would. You still have to keep coins in the bank.
The math: when does it pay off?
Coins earn passively at 1 coin per minute while you’re active in the dashboard (with a few smaller bonuses from daily rituals and referrals). That’s 1,440 coins per day — almost three full renewals worth per day of presence.
Soul Bond costs 5,000 coins. Without it, renewing a starter server every seven days costs 500 coins per cycle (more as you upgrade your pool). That means:
- Direct break-even: Soul Bond doesn’t pay back in coins — the 5,000 is pure convenience cost. You still spend the same renewal per week per server with or without it.
- Real break-even: the first time it saves a server from expiring. One forgotten week = full world wipe = hours or days of work lost. If you’ve ever lost progress to an expiry, Soul Bond pays for itself the moment you press Buy.
- Multi-server users: the value compounds. Three servers = three renewal reminders per week to track manually. With Soul Bond, that’s three auto-debits and zero clicks.
If you check your dashboard daily anyway and only run one server, you probably don’t need Soul Bond. If you check weekly, run more than one server, or just don’t want to think about expiries, it’s the single best store artifact for free-tier users.
How the renewal sweep actually works
The renewal sweep runs on a daily schedule and processes every server in one pass. For each server, it does roughly this:
- Is the server expiring within the next 24 hours? If yes, and the user’s balance is running low, send a low-balance reminder (in-dashboard notification + Discord DM if linked) that states the exact amount they need.
- Is the server past its expiry date and Auto-Renew is on? If yes, check the user’s coin balance against that server’s renewal amount:
- Enough to cover it → deduct the renewal, roll expiry forward 7 days
- Not enough → skip; the server falls into the same grace-then-suspend-then-delete cycle as any free server
- Is the server past expiry and Auto-Renew is off? Begin the standard grace window.
The Discord webhook events from Soul Bond renewals show up as a clean Server auto-renewed line in your linked channel, so you have a paper trail of every cycle.
How to buy Soul Bond
Soul Bond shows up under Store → Artifacts as a one-time purchase. Like every other store item, it deducts coins atomically — if you don’t have 5,000, the purchase fails cleanly and your balance is untouched.
Once purchased, the artifact is permanent on your account. There’s no “refund,” no expiry, no subscription. You bought it, it’s yours.
What to do if you already lost a server to expiry
If a server fully deleted before you discovered the problem: the world is gone. We don’t keep backups of deleted free-tier servers (their data is wiped from disk to make room for new deployments). What you can do:
- Buy Soul Bond now to prevent the next loss
- Check the recovering a suspended server doc — suspended is reversible, deleted is not
- Make a habit of using the Backups tab on the manage page; backups are stored separately from the live server and survive deletion if you download them first
When Soul Bond is the wrong purchase
If you only check your dashboard once a month and aren’t earning coins regularly, Soul Bond will eventually fail you the same way manual renewals would. The artifact doesn’t change the underlying economy — it just removes the click. If you can’t sustain your weekly renewal in earnings, no amount of automation fixes that.
Consider whether your goal is:
- “I forget to click the button” → Soul Bond is perfect
- “I can’t earn enough coins to keep my server alive” → Soul Bond won’t help; you need to either spend more time earning, run fewer servers, or upgrade to Elite which doesn’t use the coin cycle at all
Wrapping up
Soul Bond is the most opinionated artifact in the store. Every other item (RAM, CPU, Disk, Slot upgrades) gives you more capacity. Soul Bond gives you peace of mind — the difference between checking the dashboard because you want to and checking because you have to.
For most users running more than one free server, it’s a no-brainer. For everyone else, it’s a quality-of-life upgrade that pays for itself the first time you would have forgotten.
For more on the economy that surrounds it:
- The Witchly Coin Economy Explained — earning rates, daily streaks, referral bonuses
- Free Server Renewal Cycle Deep Dive — the full seven-day timeline
- Free vs Premium Hosting on Witchly — when Elite makes more sense than coin-stacking