What this costs and who pays
Two questions arrive in different words: what is the catch, and how long will this stay free. Both are easier to answer with arithmetic than with a promise, so here is the arithmetic.
What is fixed
Free, with nothing held back
There is no paid version, no feature behind a login, and no plan for either. The program is GPL-3.0 and the whole of it is on GitHub.
Nothing is collected
No telemetry, no analytics, no account needed to install a mod. Every address the app can contact is listed, and the list is short.
No advertising, and nothing sold
Not on the site, not in the app, not in the installer. The catalog belongs to its own authors and is not ours to sell.
What it costs to run
Per month, in euros, because that is what the largest line is billed in. The free tiers are the published ones, not a favour.
- Domain€0.80 · dota2modmanager.com, about $10.50 a year at Cloudflare Registrar, billed in dollars
- Site and CDN€0.00 · Cloudflare Pages and Workers, free plan
- Mod and update mirror€0.00 · Cloudflare R2, free up to 10 GB; 8.8 GB used
- Build machines€0.00 · GitHub Actions, free for a public repository
- Code assistant€22.50 · Claude Pro, after tax. The subscription this project is written with, said out loud because the README says so too
- Total€23.30
What it earns
Nothing. There is no revenue, no donation page, no sponsor paying for placement, and no affiliate link anywhere on this site or in the app. The difference comes out of the maintainer's pocket and has since July 2026.
What actually helps
Report what broke, with the diagnostic file
Settings, Diagnostics, Export. It is a zip of what the app sees, and it turns a day of guessing into an afternoon of fixing.
Star the repository
It costs nothing and it is the number every programme that gives things to open source looks at first.
Translate it
The app speaks English and Russian. A third language is a pull request away.
Tell somebody
A guide, a post, a comment under a video. That is how people found it so far.
Sponsorship
No money is accepted and none is asked for. What is useful is a service the project already needs: a code signing certificate, a status page, a translation platform. If you run one of those and it has a free tier for open source, write to [email protected] and it will be credited here and in the README.
Checking any of this
The numbers about the program itself, the version, the mod count, the releases and the downloads, are on the facts page and are read from the catalog and the GitHub API at build time. Whether any of it is answering right now is on the status page at dota2modmanager.betteruptime.com, which checks the update feed, the mirror, the catalog and this site every three minutes. What the app does on a machine is in its security policy, and what it promises is in the assurance case.