Mastodon Pricing: Is Mastodon Free? Server Hosting Cost Breakdown

Mastodon Pricing Tiers

What you don't get with Mastodon

• ⚠ Self-hosting requires ongoing Linux server administration and security patching
• ⚠ Storage costs increase as media (images, videos) accumulate
• ⚠ Bandwidth costs can be significant for active instances with federated media
• ⚠ Time investment to configure, moderate, and maintain your own server
• ⚠ No human verification regardless of hosting option

The Two Versions of “Mastodon Pricing”

Mastodon pricing depends entirely on what you want to do with it.

If you want to use Mastodon as a social network — post, follow people, read a timeline — you join an existing server. That’s free.

If you want to run your own Mastodon server — with your own domain, your own rules, and control over who joins — you pay for hosting. The software itself is free and open source; the server that runs it is not.

Joining an Existing Instance: $0

The Mastodon server with the most users is mastodon.social, run by the nonprofit behind Mastodon. Signing up is free. You get a @username@mastodon.social handle and access to the full Mastodon feature set.

There are thousands of other Mastodon instances, many focused on specific topics or communities. fosstodon.org is popular with open source and Linux people. infosec.exchange is active in the security community. joining.social maintains a list of open-registration instances with their focus areas.

All of these are free to join. Your handle format is @username@instancename.tld.

Running Your Own Server

This is where cost enters the picture.

A small Mastodon instance — personal use, or a community under a few hundred active users — can run on a basic VPS. Hetzner’s CX22 runs around €4-5/month. DigitalOcean’s $6/month droplet is a common starting point. Linode and Vultr offer similar pricing.

The catch: you need to install and configure Mastodon on that server. This requires familiarity with Linux, Docker or bare-metal deployment, Nginx or Caddy configuration, PostgreSQL, Redis, and ongoing security updates. It is not a one-click setup.

If that’s too much, managed Mastodon hosting services exist. masto.host is the best-known; their starter tier starts around €6/month and handles all the server administration. You get your own domain and control without needing Linux skills.

Storage is the variable cost. A personal instance stays small. A public instance that federates with other servers caches media from across the network, and storage requirements grow continuously. Budget for this if you’re running a public-facing server.

What Mastodon Doesn’t Include at Any Price

Human verification is not available on Mastodon, regardless of which hosting option you choose. Individual server admins can require manual account approval before new users can join their specific instance, but this is a per-server decision and doesn’t represent any form of identity verification. There is no network-wide mechanism to confirm that account holders are real humans.

This is a deliberate design: Mastodon prioritizes decentralization and community control over centralized identity systems. The tradeoff is that bot accounts are as technically straightforward to create as human accounts.

Truliv Compared

Truliv starts with a 30-day free trial, then $9/month. The $9 includes human verification — every account on the network passes a liveness check before posting. No biometric data is retained.

The direct monetary comparison: Mastodon is free to join (or $6-15/month to run your own server), Truliv is $9/month after the trial.

What you’re paying for with Truliv is not features — it’s the guarantee that every account in the network is a verified human. Start your free trial to find out if that matters to you.