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ROK is free to play, and it always will be. This is what it costs to run one — and why the price is shaped the way it is rather than copied off a SaaS page.
Vandeth
ROK is free to play, and it always will be. This is what it costs to run one — and why the price is shaped the way it is rather than copied off a SaaS page.
Every number here is a starting position, not a decision. $19 is deliberately low — a venue charging $8 a visit breaks even on three extra people a month, and it is far easier to raise a price than to cut one.
The whole product rests on one sentence: a visitor with three days in the country will not install anything. Every code is a plain URL and the phone's camera is the scanner, because anything heavier is a thing people don't do while standing in a street.
A paywall is worse than an install. An install costs thirty seconds; a card costs a decision. So every limit below is a limit on making a trail — never on walking one. Nobody is ever asked to pay to scan a code, see their progress, keep a token, or read a hunt's wall.
One live trail · up to 8 stations · certificate reward · listed publicly · staff PIN redemption. A café or a small museum finding out whether anyone plays.
Billed annually — $190/yr. Three live trails · unlimited stations · A5 booklet export · venue page and credit · collect-at-reception rewards · the wall, and completion counts. A pepper farm, a château, a museum — somewhere with a season and a door.
Everything in Venue · one trail, one run · no renewal, no reminder. A festival, a school, a hotel week. A subscription is the wrong shape for a thing with an end date.
Printed, numbered, sealed · your motif or ours · replaceable paper insert · reissued between seasons. Goods, not software. A 40mm token is 20–40 minutes of printer time and it does not scale like a subscription.
Collect trails and quest trails are quietly two different businesses. A quest trail is bolted to a wall once and costs almost nothing to run for a decade. A collect trail spends real PETG, real printer hours and a real motorbike round to place and retrieve. Folding tokens into a monthly fee would give the fee a margin the tokens then eat.
Live trails — priced on it. A trail already knows whether it is running — it carries the dates it opens and closes. Nothing new has to be invented to count them, and it is the thing a venue thinks they bought.
Stations — priced on it. The free tier's ceiling, and the one number that tracks how much of the product somebody is actually using.
Staff seats — not priced. Venues share one staff PIN today; there are no venue logins to count. Per-seat pricing would force us to build accounts before we had sold anything.
Players — never. See the rule above. Charging a venue more because their trail was popular is a fine way to make them wish it weren't.
Completions — held back. Every reward redeemed at a counter is already recorded, so we could bill per completion, and it would align perfectly. Reconciling fifty-cent line items by bank transfer is a job. Kept in the pocket for a venue that asks.
Stripe does not operate in Cambodia. Local business runs on ABA, Wing and Bakong's KHQR — and KHQR is a push: the payer scans and sends. Nothing can pull from it on a schedule.
So a "monthly subscription" here is honestly an annual invoice in US dollars plus a polite reminder. That is not a workaround, it is how every other supplier a venue deals with already works. Annual is the default and monthly is a courtesy. If card billing is ever genuinely needed — a hotel group, a foreign operator — the answer is a merchant of record rather than building a payments stack for it.
Nothing moderates the public listing yet. Taking money to list a hunt makes us responsible for what is on it, and that is not a debt to discover after the first invoice.
When a venue lapses, their season simply ends: the cloth freezes, the wall stays readable, nothing is deleted and no code starts throwing errors at somebody standing in front of a plaque. That is a far kinder failure than switching a QR code off, and it already works that way.
Give them a full season free, in exchange for a case study and a commitment to keep the trail live to the end of it. Then set the number from what they actually did with it, rather than from what a spreadsheet guessed.
The one thing worth charging for immediately is not really about money: a small fee to list a hunt publicly. A card is an identity, and that fee is mostly friction against the abuse a public listing invites.