“How much does a FiveM server cost?” gets answered with either “$10/month!” or “$5,000” depending on who’s selling what. Here’s the real budget breakdown for a serious roleplay city, line by line.
Hosting: $10–$150/month
- Budget game hosts ($10–30/mo): fine for testing and small communities under ~32 players. You share hardware; expect tick-rate dips at peak.
- Dedicated VPS ($40–80/mo): the sweet spot. A modern 8-core VPS with 16GB RAM and NVMe storage runs a 64-slot modded city comfortably.
- Bare metal ($80–150/mo): for 100+ slot cities or heavy AI/NPC systems. Single-thread CPU speed matters more than core count for FiveM.
Scripts: $0–$1,500 one-time
The framework (Qbox/QBCore) is free. What costs money is everything that makes your city different: jobs, businesses, MDTs, phones, activities. Quality paid scripts run $10–40 each; a well-rounded city uses 15–40 of them. Budget $300–800 for a solid launch catalog — and treat “free” leaked scripts as what they are: backdoor delivery mechanisms that get servers banned.
Maps & MLOs: $0–$500
Interior MLOs range from free community work to $50+ premium builds. Watch for conflicts — two MLOs editing the same block will fight, and debugging that costs more time than the MLO cost money.
Vehicles, EUP & Assets: $0–$300
Curated add-on vehicle packs and EUP uniforms. The mistake isn’t spending too little here — it’s adding 400 unoptimized cars that eat your streaming budget and crash clients mid-drive.
The Costs Nobody Budgets
- Your time. 100–300 hours to build a city properly. At any hourly value, this dwarfs the cash costs.
- Development help: custom features, fixes, migrations — $30–75/hr freelance, or fixed-quote per feature like we do.
- Web presence: domain + a landing page/store if you sell perks (keep it Cfx.re ToS-compliant).
- Backups: effectively free to set up, catastrophically expensive to skip.
Three Realistic Budgets
- Hobby city (~$50/mo + $200 one-time): budget VPS, free framework, a dozen carefully-chosen paid scripts, free MLOs. Totally viable for a friends-and-regulars community.
- Serious launch (~$80/mo + $800 one-time): proper VPS, full paid script catalog, premium MLOs, EUP, and someone on call for fixes.
- Done-for-you (from ~$1,500 one-time + hosting): a professional server build — everything installed, configured, economy-balanced, and handed over with docs. You skip the 300 hours.
