late 2024 downtime notes & funding update

hello everyone, i'm sure you've noticed the recent bot issues the past few weeks. i'll explain a little about it here, hopefully it helps understand a bit of what's going on.

in short: pluralkit is in close to 850,000 discord servers by now. running such a large discord bot is hard work and it's expensive; all of us in the staff team are putting in our own time and money to make the bot as best as it can be - it's an accessibility tool first and foremost, and we care about everyone who uses the bot (even if it's not for an accessibility reason! that's fine too!) and we're happy to do what we can for y'all.

unfortunately, the time and money we are able to put in right now is not quite enough to have the bot run smoothly. we're at a point where the size of the bot is just over our technical and financial capabilities, and we're working through making adjustments for that. it'll be rocky for some time longer, so please bear with us while we figure things out.

in the future, we're looking at creating a "pluralkit premium" to offer some extra paid features (don't worry, no existing features will ever become paid), so we can pay staff/devs for their time working on pluralkit. it'll take a while, legal company things are not something any of us are experienced in. hopefully at 1 million servers? no promises, though!

in the short-term, we'd like to be able to afford better, more reliable servers, without paying for them out of our own pockets. if you can, please consider subscribing to our new patreon (opens new window) or making a one-time donation on buymeacoffee (opens new window) - even just a dollar or two is really helpful. (if you'd like to donate but neither of those work, please reach out and we'll see what we can do)

we're also looking for technical help on infrastructure and non-bot backend services. all of the code and infrastructure for pluralkit is open-source on our github (opens new window). if you're familiar with running real-time software at scale and are able to help, we'd really appreciate it.

finally, thank you for using and sharing and talking about pluralkit. this has never meant to be a big business, or a business at all; it was created to be a useful resource to plural folk, and we're very happy it's been useful to so many people. many of you have written unofficial guides and youtube videos and other resources, as well as created websites and apps and tools that integrate with pluralkit. we love seeing the work all of you put in to make everyone else's experience better.

any thoughts/comments are welcome in the #suggestions-feedback (opens new window) channel of the support server: https://discord.gg/PczBt78 (opens new window)

- astrid, iris, alyssa, pals, and the rest of the pluralkit team