Everything you need. Free, thanks to those who chip in ʕᵔᴥᵔʔ

If the site brings joy to your table, chip in and help us keep it running.

Hobbyist is designed for the casual board gamer. It gives you all the core features you need without overwhelming you with options. It's straightforward, completely free and what the majority needs.

Enthusiast is designed for the dedicated board gamer. It includes features to organize larger board game libraries, manage multiple communities and advanced features that most people frankly don't need. Pay-what-you-want pricing.

Start with a guest account and upgrade later if you decide to stay.

Why have two tiers if both are free?

Not everyone cares as much about board games as the people reading pricing pages for board game collection managers and event organization apps. Most people just want to vote on what times work for them and see if anyone is bringing snacks.

That's why we separate basic and advanced usage. It lets us hide the complexity and advanced features from casual participants, so your friends have a better experience navigating and using the app. We also support guest accounts, so they don't even need to sign up just to participate.

Additionally, the tier choice gives us an indication whether you might be interested in helping keep a site running. Rather than bothering your friends, customers, or meetup participants by asking them for donations, we only bother you ʕ•ᴥ-ʔ

So the Enthusiast tier is also free?

Yes. You decide what you want to pay, including nothing.

Kallax.io is a passion project, built and maintained by two friends in their spare time. Our goal of the site is not to be profitable but to help create something useful for the board gaming community and bring people together.

For commercial usage, we do ask that you pay and help support the site, if you can. The board gaming industry, especially physical retailers, is not always the most profitable. If your business doesn't have the funds to support us right now, that's okay too.

We'd rather you enjoy the site for free than not at all.

Why this model, why not ...

The short answer is that it works well and feels fair to us. Ideally, the site would just be funded entirely by donations but over the years we've tried a few different methods and found pay-what-you-want pricing to be the most effective.

Relying purely on donations made it difficult to budget, and people often needed a little nudge, like an annual fundraising run, to remember to support the site. That took time and effort away from feature development, and the results were unpredictable.

Pay-what-you-want pricing allows us to gently nudge people to consider supporting the site at the moment they are actually using and (hopefully) already getting some real value from the site. Hiding features behind a soft paywall and calling it a donation is a shady practice and a legal grey-area, that's why Enthusiast is a subscription with an unlimited free trial.

That way we bother the least amount of people, pay the correct taxes, and get a somewhat stable source of revenue. Being able to predict our revenue allows us to make long-term commitments on hosting resources which makes the support go much further.