Ads and a paid option

Coming soonThis is not available yet. The page below explains what it will be and why it is not open — nothing here can be used or bought today.

None of this is running. ModsDrop shows no advertising today, there is nothing to buy, and no page on this site asks for payment details. What follows is how I think the money side would have to work if the site grows, and it is honest about the parts I have not decided. Read it as a plan, not an offer.

Where things stand

ModsDrop hosts my own library of mods and nothing else. Uploading is not open to other people. There are no ad slots on any page, no ad scripts loading, and no payment form anywhere on the site. Open a file page and you get the file details, the download button and a short countdown. That is all of it.

I pay the bills myself. The servers and the file storage are at Hetzner in Germany, and the traffic passes through Cloudflare. That is a monthly cost whether anybody downloads or not, and it rises as I add storage.

Why advertising is the plan

A free file host has three futures. The operator keeps paying out of pocket and the site stays small. Or the bills win, speeds get cut down to nothing and people leave. Or advertising covers the storage and the bandwidth. I would rather say plainly that the third one is what I am aiming at than pretend hosting costs nothing.

I know how that sounds. Ads on a file host are the thing modders complain about most, and the reputation is earned: fake download buttons, pop-unders, redirects, countdowns that restart. If advertising does start here, my intention is that it sits around the file rather than in the way of it, and that no ad format is allowed to imitate a download button. That is a rule I am setting for myself. It is not something you can inspect today, because there is nothing to inspect. No network is serving ads on this site, and what a network would pay for this kind of traffic is not something I can know before it runs.

A share for the people who upload

The point of ModsDrop is to grow into a host where other mod authors put their files and receive a share of what the advertising earns on those files. That is the plan and nothing more than the plan. It is not built. No author has been paid anything. There is no way to sign up to be paid, and there is no waiting list.

I am not going to invent the numbers. Undecided, all of it:

• the size of the share, and how it is counted
• whether a payout has a minimum, and what that would be
• how money would actually reach somebody, and which countries that can work for
• how a download from a bot, or the same person downloading twice, is treated

These depend on two things I cannot know yet: what an advertising network really pays for this kind of traffic once it is running, and what payment routes are workable and legal for one person running a small site from Hungary. Any figure I published now would be a guess dressed up as a promise, and somebody would plan around it.

The paid option I am weighing up

I am thinking about a paid option: pay, see no ads, skip the countdown. I would rather explain the trade-off than sell it, because I have not decided whether to build it at all.

The argument for it is simple. Some people would rather pay than look at ads, and that money is steadier than ad revenue. The argument against is just as simple, and it is the one that makes me hesitate. Every person who pays is a person the ads no longer earn from. If authors are paid out of advertising, a paid option that skips the ads quietly takes money out of their pockets, unless what is paid is counted into their share as well. I do not want to build something that looks generous to readers and costs the uploaders. So if it is built, the author share would have to be worked out from both sources. That is the part I am still thinking through.

No price is set. There is no currency, no decision between a one-off payment and a subscription, no payment processor chosen and nothing to buy. This site takes no card details, no bank details and no accounts of any kind.

What I am not planning to change

Downloading a file is free today and I intend to keep it that way. I am not planning to put files behind a payment. If a paid option is ever built, what it would remove is advertising and waiting, not access. The file itself is not the thing I want to sell.

I will not ask you to pay to unlock a file

Please take this seriously, because it is exactly what scam sites imitate. If a page that looks like this one asks for a card number, a phone payment, an SMS, a gift-card code, a crypto transfer or a small “verification” fee to release a file, it is not me and it is not this site. Close it, and check that the address really is modsdrop.com. A paid option, if it is ever built, would be about removing ads and waiting. It would never be about releasing a file you would otherwise be refused.

If you see something claiming to be ModsDrop and asking for payment, tell me about it.

How this page changes

If advertising starts, and if a paid option is ever built, this page is rewritten with the real terms, and the terms are updated with it. I am not giving a date, because I do not have one. Until then everything above is a plan, and a plan is not something you can use.