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 four main earning methods, and they stack.
1. AFK earning on the dashboard — 1 coin per 120 seconds
The simplest method: open the dashboard, sit on the Earn page, and your account accrues 1 coin every 120 seconds (30 coins per hour). 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.
- The daily AFK cap is 250 coins (reached after about 8 hours 20 minutes). Hours beyond that don’t accumulate further.
If you do nothing else, an hour on the earn page gets you 30 coins. Regular daily sessions of a few hours easily cover your weekly renewal.
2. Daily ritual — 10 to 150 coins (requires a Linkvertise link)
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 | 10 coins |
| Day 2 | 20 coins |
| Day 3 | 40 coins |
| Day 4 | 60 coins |
| Day 5 | 80 coins |
| Day 6 | 100 coins |
| Day 7 | 150 coins |
A perfect 7-day streak nets you 460 coins total. After Day 7, the reward stays at 150/day for every day you keep the streak going. Miss a day, and the streak resets to Day 1.
Important: claiming the daily ritual now requires completing a Linkvertise link first — this is the gateway to the claim button. If you’re already completing Linkvertise links for the dedicated Linkvertise earning method (below), the ritual is just one extra click on the same page.
The daily ritual is a reliable coin-per-effort method. Once your streak reaches Day 7 and beyond, the 150-coin daily payout is hard to beat for the time invested.
3. Linkvertise links — 50 coins per link, up to 2 per day
A newer earning method on the Earn → Linkvertise section of your dashboard: complete a short Linkvertise link and earn 50 Witchly Coins. You can complete up to 2 links per day for a maximum of 100 coins/day.
Completing a Linkvertise link means going through the link’s required steps (a brief ad interaction) and being redirected back — at that point the system credits your account server-side. Bypass tools and ad-blockers won’t work; the server verifies completion before issuing credit.
This is also the gateway for the daily ritual — the claim button only activates after completing a Linkvertise link on that same page.
4. Referrals — 500 coins each
Every account has a unique referral code. When a new user signs up using your code, you earn 500 coins once they’re verified. There’s no cap on referrals — invite ten friends and you’ve earned 5,000 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 typical daily earning picture for an engaged user:
- Up to 250 coins from AFK earning (daily cap, ~8h 20m to reach)
- Up to 100 coins from Linkvertise links (2 × 50, takes a few minutes)
- 150 coins from the daily ritual (once streak reaches Day 7+)
- 500 coins from each referral (occasional, not daily)
On a fully-loaded day (AFK cap hit, both Linkvertise links done, streak at Day 7+), you earn 500 coins from passive + Linkvertise + ritual alone — a full starter renewal in one day. Add a referral and it’s 1,000.
A power user — daily streak active, regular earn sessions, growing community — 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 |
|---|---|---|
| +1024 MB 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 |
| +4096 MB disk | 1,000 coins | Four more gigabytes of disk |
| +1 server slot | 5,000 coins | Lets you host one more server simultaneously |
| Auto-renew unlock (Soul Bond) | 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+ (150 coins/day) is too good to leave on the table. Remember you’ll need to complete a Linkvertise link first — bundle it with your two daily Linkvertise earns.
- Share your referral link in your server’s Discord or any community where friends might want to host. 500 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 Day 7+ streak: 150 coins/day = 1,050 coins/week
- Linkvertise links (2/day): 100 coins/day = 700 coins/week
- AFK earning (partial sessions): 30 coins/hour, up to 250/day
- Net surplus (ritual + Linkvertise alone): ~1,750 coins/week against a 500-coin renewal
Ritual + Linkvertise together cover ~3.5× a starter renewal per week without touching AFK at all. Add a referral or two and you’re building a real coin buffer.
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 + Linkvertise income 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)
- Complete your Linkvertise links and claim the daily ritual each day
- 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, the server renewal walkthrough, and the Linkvertise earning guide.