What is free here, and what is not

Flockbay is built on Godot, which is open source under a permissive licence. That is not a promotional arrangement that can be withdrawn. It is the engine your game actually runs on, and it does not cost anything.

Your project is a Godot project on your own disk. If you stopped using this app tomorrow, Godot would still open it and you would still have your game. That is worth checking before you invest time in any tool, including this one.

Flockbay takes no share of what you sell, on Steam or anywhere else. The app prepares your Steam store page and exports it as a .zip you upload in Steamworks yourself, at no charge. Steam's own fee is Valve's.

The AI. Every time Flockbay writes code or something gets generated, that runs on hardware somebody pays for. Here that somebody is whoever runs the AI you connect, not Flockbay.

So that is the part you bring. Flockbay is free on your own AI: your Claude or ChatGPT plan, your own agent, or an API key. Flockbay builds from a library of ready-made objects, or with Godot's own shapes.

What stays free is everything you do yourself. In a 3D project that is the landscape, the water, the weather, the time of day, the cameras and NPC behaviour. In a flat one it is the tile ground you paint, the sky and band of scenery behind it, the numbers that decide how the person walks and jumps, and the sprites you place. Both sides include your own textures, sound effects, props and character rigs, play and preview, and sharing with playtesters. No watermark on any of it.

More on this: Make a game with AI for free: what free actually gets you

Compared to a fully free path, which is downloading Godot yourself and learning GDScript. That path costs nothing and costs months. If you enjoy learning to program, it is genuinely a good option and this page is not going to argue against it.

Compared to browser tools with free tiers, the trade is different. Those are free to start and constrained by the tab: small scenes, limited memory, reduced graphics. Here the engine and your hardware are unconstrained, and the AI is Demo each day or your own Claude or ChatGPT.

The obvious way to split that is by dimension: browser tools for 2D, a download for 3D. That is the wrong line. A flat game here is a project you pick at creation, from two pictures, and it opens already running — a person walking and jumping over ground you widen by dragging, with 55,073 of the Catalogue's 60,648 objects available to place as sprites.

What running locally actually decides is the same in either case: whether the game plays at your machine's framerate, and whether the project is a folder you own. For a 3D world with terrain and weather it also decides whether the thing is possible at all, which is a third argument on top rather than the only one.

It is a desktop app for Windows. You download and install it, and it ships with Godot inside it. The game runs on your machine.

Building needs an internet connection, because the AI and world data come over the network. Playing what you built does not.

There is no team, per-seat or enterprise plan. It is a desktop app for one person. Flockbay is free, and so is its AI. Flockbay has no paid plans.

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It is worth being clear about the shape of the trade rather than promising unlimited free AI and quietly enforcing limits later.

AI costs real money per request. A tool that gave unlimited AI assistance for free would not survive, so Flockbay never runs it for nothing: it runs on the one you already have, and you pay its company the way you already do, or on Demo, which is free each day and comes back the next day. Flockbay has no paid plans.

You will know whether you want the AI doing that work after a week of using it, which is why the download is free. Nothing here requires a decision before you have seen the tool.

More on this: Flockbay is free on your own AI: you pay the company that runs your model, and Flockbay nothing.

It stops at the AI. Building the world by hand uses no AI at all. Asking Flockbay for large systems or a lot of generated art uses Demo, free each day, or your own AI and your own keys. Pictures and sound run on the free AI. A 3D model uses your own Tripo key.

That is worth knowing, because the part of the work that takes the longest — shaping the landscape, the water, the weather and the light in a 3D project, or painting ground and arranging sprites in a flat one — is the part that costs nothing.

A first small project usually costs little on any of them. A sustained project with a lot of generated art is where what your AI costs starts to matter, and that is on your provider's side, because Flockbay does not charge for it.

More on this: Refunds and cancelling